Agricultural-Evidence-Synthesis-Hub

Evidence Synthesis for Agricultural Practices hub

Simple comparisons and guides for evidence synthesis tools

What this is for

There are many tools available for conducting evidence synthesis in agriculture tools for screening studies, de-duplicating records, coding data, visualising results, and more. But choosing the right ones and understanding how they fit together can be challenging, especially when dealing with diverse agricultural practices and contexts.

This repository helps by:

Showing how each tool works, with examples from agricultural research and practice.
Explaining what each tool is good for, and where it struggles, when applied to farming systems, crop and livestock studies, or rural livelihoods.
Providing shared code, templates, and training materials tailored to agricultural evidence synthesis.
Helping you combine tools into a common format for easier integration across systematic reviews, meta-analyses, and evidence maps in agriculture.

We don’t build new tools here: we show how to use and combine existing ones in ways that make them relevant and practical for agricultural evidence synthesis.

GitHub Pages

Each tool has its own page :

Keyword Search and References

🔗 litsearchr vignette (Generates Keywords): View Report
🔗 Open Alex vignette (Getting Open Source Papers): View Report

Screening

🔗 Abstrackr vignette (Manual Screening Web Page): View Report
🔗 Colandr vignette (Manual Screening Web Page): View Report
🔗 AIscreenR vignette (Screen with AI): View Report

Tagging

🔗 GPT Tagging vignette: View Report

How to use this repo (R workflow)

You can …

Explore the worked examples with real datasets
Copy the R Markdown / Quarto templates to start your own review
Benchmark different screening tools side by side
Learn via the included training exercises

Quick start

# clone the repository
git clone https://github.com/<org-or-username>/evidence-synthesis-hub.git
cd evidence-synthesis-hub

Contributing

We welcome contributions from others working in evidence synthesis. You can:

Add a page for a new tool
Share your benchmark or walkthrough
Improve or translate existing guides

Contact

Project lead: Lolita Muller
Institutions: Alliance for Bioversity
Email: m.lolita@cgiar.org

Citation

If you use this repository, please cite it as:

Muller, L., Rosenstock, T., Estrada Carmona, N., Sanchez, A., Jones, S., & Bellouin, D. (2025).  
Agricultural Evidence Synthesis Hub (Version 1.0.0).  
Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT, CIRAD. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17350090