Research Support Community Day, Online, James Cook University 24 – 26 June 2025
Full Text Seeker: A tool to assist with systematic reviews
Abstract:
Large systematic reviews can require locating the full text files for several hundred articles. Written with macro code from Microsoft Copilot prompts, Full Text Seeker is an Excel spreadsheet that takes a Comma-Separated Values (CSV) file of article references and generates a list of clickable links to run searches in Doi.org, Google Scholar, Internet Scholar Archive, ResearchGate, and in library search tools such as Primo. This session will demonstrate how the spreadsheet generates the links, and how it can be modified for different catalogues.
eResearch Australasia, Melbourne, 28 October – 1 November, 2024
Full Text Seeker: Using Microsoft Copilot to create a tool to assist with systematic reviews
Abstract:
Large systematic reviews can require locating the full text files for several hundred articles. Written with macro code from Microsoft Copilot, Full Text Seeker is an Excel spreadsheet that takes a Comma-Separated Values (CSV) file of article references and generates a list of clickable links to run searches in Doi.org, Google Scholar, Internet Scholar Archive, and ResearchGate.
A series of prompts in Microsoft Copilot generated macro code for Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications in Excel. The Full Text Seeker spreadsheet uses these macros behind two buttons – one to import the CSV and one to automatically generate the list of links.
Full Text Seeker has been used by the author in three recent systematic reviews. One review required 569 full text articles. Using EndNote and Zotero functions located 346 of the articles, and the remaining 223 were exported to Full Text Seeker. The spreadsheet generated links that allowed for the retrieval of 211 of those articles, leaving only twelve for inter-library loan requests. The automatic links saved the entering of 223 titles into multiple search engines.
Further testing by a wider group of researchers and librarians will improve Full Text Seeker. Additional search strings could be added for the concatenate functions. It requires the enabling of macros to run on Excel on Windows based computers. Future improvements include versions for Mac Excel and Google Sheets. Full Text Seeker is available on Figshare under a CC-BY 4.0 licence.
Divider image “Ornamental Divider Pack” from Freepik.com
tracybruce.net 