![]() Between 60 and 75 percent of other language articles were estimated to take between 6 and 30 additional minutes to extract, with generally most of the remaining articles requiring more than 30 minutes extra. Extraction of other translated articles generally took longer. For Spanish articles, extractors estimated that 56 percent of articles took less than 5 additional minutes to extract, and all but one article took up to 30 additional minutes to extract. Extractors were asked to estimate how much additional time they spent on each translated article compared with the time they likely would have spent with a comparable English article ( Table 4). The assessment by the English language data extractors was that extraction from translated articles generally took more time than extraction from an equivalent English-language article would have taken. One Chinese article took almost 2 hours because the non-Chinese characters (such as words and numbers) within the file were copied to gibberish and had to be manually retyped for proper translation. Because the quality of the translated text was greatly improved after removing these superfluous spaces, this extra step was undertaken. ![]() When text from this particular article was copied and pasted into either Google Translate or Microsoft Word, the copied text included spaces randomly placed within most of the words. One German article was clearly an outlier in that it took almost 4 hours to translate because of the poor quality of the original file. Other issues we encountered included that one Spanish PDF could not be read originally but could after it was saved as a TIFF file from which another PDF was created one German article required removing multiple instances of “¬” (an optional hyphen) before translation could succeed. ![]() Since Google Translate attempted to maintain the original formatting and because some written languages are much more compact than English, the English text ran from one column to the next, overlapping the text in the second column. Translation of tables was frequently very time consuming as it required a large number of translations of individual row and column headers and formatting in the translated Word document.įor numerous articles, particularly those in the Chinese language, Google Translate could directly translate the PDF or HTML file, but the resulting file was unreadable because of heavily overlapping text across columns therefore, manual copying and pasting of these articles had to be done. We discovered (and were informed by the Chinese speakers among us) that we needed to remove false line breaks (artifactual breaks not at the end of sentences) in the Asian language articles to allow meaningful translation. This often involved using the appropriate alphabet from the original language, and removing false line breaks, hyphens, and unnecessary spaces. The extra time required to translate the other articles consisted mainly of iteratively copying blocks of text (paragraphs or columns) from the article into the Google Translate Web site and then copying the translated text into Word documents. However, the ease of translation was largely related to the file and text types used by the journals and whether Google Translate could read these directly or not. These texts were then copied to Word documents after translation. In general, the European- and Japanese-language articles could be translated automatically from their PDF or HTML files. She had oversight and assistance from the director of the EPC she was affiliated with. The medical resident with no prior systematic review experience extracted 10 original language articles. ![]() Nine investigators judged that they have a lot of comfort with the Cochrane risk of bias questions, 4 had moderate comfort, 1 had little comfort, and 1 had no experience with assessing risk of bias. Eight investigators have extracted more than 100 studies, 4 have extracted 51 to 100 studies, and 3 have extracted 50 or fewer articles. Six of the investigators have participated in more than 20 systematic reviews, 1 has participated in 11 to 20 reviews, 5 in 6 to 10 reviews, and 3 in 5 or fewer reviews. The median duration of experience with data extraction was 5 years, with 4 extractors having 10 to 14 years of experience, and 4 having less than 1 year of experience. (or both) researchers, 2 are research associates (or equivalent), and 2 are medical residents with research experience. Among the 15 investigators who extracted data from original language articles (10 investigators) and translated and English articles (9 investigators), 11 are M.D.
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