Adjutant: an R-based tool to support topic discovery for systematic and literature reviews

Abstract

SummaryAdjutant is an open-source, interactive, and R-based application to support mining PubMed for a systematic or a literature review. Given a PubMed-compatible search query, Adjutant downloads the relevant articles and allows the user to perform an unsupervised clustering analysis to identify data-driven topic clusters. Users can also sample documents using different strategies to obtain a more manageable dataset for further analysis. Adjutant makes explicit trade-offs between speed and accuracy, which are modifiable by the user, such that a complete analysis of several thousand documents can take a few minutes. All analytic datasets generated by Adjutant are saved, allowing users to easily conduct other downstream analyses that Adjutant does not explicitly support.\n\nAvailability and ImplementationAdjutant is implemented in R, using Shiny, and is available at https://github.com/amcrisan/Adjutant