Monitors
A Monitor configures a product search, its schedule, automation settings, and what teams get to screen and QC results.
Last updated
A Monitor configures a product search, its schedule, automation settings, and what teams get to screen and QC results.
Last updated
In MLM-AI, a Monitor defines the product search and how results will be screened. In a monitor you define:
The search terms to include in the query (ex: product name and relevant synonyms)
What literature databases to search
How often should results be produced (weekly, daily, or on demand)
Permissions: what teams will perform reviews
Notification and automation to be carried out by MLM-AI
Watch the walk through below to learn more about configuring search strategies in MLM-AI using Monitors:
To configure monitors, users must be part of a team that grants one of the following permissions:
System Administrator
Monitor Management
To create a new monitor, click "+ Add Monitor" from the Monitors menu.
Alternatively chose to Copy the definitions from an existing monitor if you wish to replicate existing configuration settings.
Give your new monitor a name: e.g. Oxytocin
To add search terms just enter the product name or compound in the keyword or compound field.
This will auto-populate a list of synonyms to choose from in the box below titled Available synonyms.
You can select the synonyms from the list or click on select all. After that click on "Add Selected".
Your selected terms will appear in the "Chosen Search Terms" box. Items in this list will be searched as an OR-based search strategy.
Click "🔍Preview Results" to run the search in the MLM-AI database. This will let you browse results and estimate the expected volume of hits.
Additional relevant terms can be added to a monitor in the "User Defined Keyterms" section. Use this feature to create additional highlights that facilitate screening. For example: terms of interest (symptoms, concomitant medications) relevant to particular products
Select the "Apply user defined keyterms" checkbox to enable the keywords list. Terms can be added one at a time or by copy/pasting a list using "Multi-Line"
The MLM-AI Database ingests data from various literature sources daily, including repositories of global reach (PubMed, Crossref, DOAJ) complemented by various regional repositories.
Select which ones to use when searching with this monitor as shown below.
Learn more about the repositories available in the MLM-AI Database in our FAQ on data sources.
You can also customize search schedule the Monitors to run periodically (weekly or daily) or on demand. When a monitor runs on a schedule, "Day Zero" is the weekday when results will be produced (if monitor runs weekly). "ETA for Completion" specifies a number of days expected for screening completion.
This section assigns teams to screening stages, giving users permissions to update decisions on incoming abstracts.
Team Assignment
Teams can be assigned the following roles in a monitor:
Abstract Review - members of teams in this role can add screening decisions
Quality Review - members in this role can add or update other user's decisions.
The Quality Review role is assigned to teams in charge of "QC" activities. Multiple teams can be assigned to either Abstract Review or Quality Review roles.
Learn more about team and user setup on: Team and User Management
Special Situations and Exclusions
When users save decisions, they can select categories for exclusions and special situations. The selections are multi-choice and come pre-populated with values typical for ICSR screening.
The values can be configured per your workflow: existing entries can be removed and customized as needed.
Additional settings control monitor behavior on automatic screening and date searches
For high volume screening workloads, users can configure automated screening based on AI tags. Pre-screened results receive a corresponding exclusion and are always available in MLM-AI Review details for inspection.
Automatic EXCLUSION of tag: Animal/In Vitro
Results with the tag "Animal/In-Vitro" are automatically screened with Animal/In-Vitro study as the exclusion criteria.
Automatic INCLUSION of tag: Suspect AE
All results except the ones with the tag "Suspect AE" are automatically screened with exclusion "Missing adverse event"
Automatic INCLUSION of tag: Suspected Case or Identifiable Patient
All results except the ones with tags "Patient" and "Suspected Case" are automatically screened with exclusion "Missing patient"
When more than one INCLUSION setting is used together, MLM-AI will accept any of the chosen criteria for inclusion.
Selecting "Automatic Exclusion of duplicate articles" will automatically screen duplicates with the corresponding exclusion. This option is on by default.
Learn more about how the techniques used in automated duplicate detection on: Feature spotlight: Duplicate Detection in Biologit MLM-AI
The following settings control how dates are applied on search results:
Include abstracts found by publication date - retrieve abstracts where the publication date matches the selected date range of the review. This option is on by default and helps maintain correspondence to existing manual search strategies.
Discard publication dates older than 60 days - if the difference of an article first seen date and publication date is older than 60 days, results are discarded. This option is useful to avoid spurious results from re-publication of journals going back many years.
See also Handling Article Dates to learn more about how MLM-AI uses dates effectively.
Monitors support a number of notification options that let users:
Be notified when a review is ready for screening, or when its status changes (ex: from In Progress to Completed)
Be notified of any assessment updates, when they are part of an assessment (per the article audit log)
Send the details of an abstract and its assessments to a pre-configured list of recipients
For further details, visit the guide to configuring Notifications in MLM-AI.
Monitors can be configured with pre-defined query filters. Pre-defined filters use the same options available on the results search box and appear as shortcuts to speed up common queries.
In the example below, the monitor is configured with one pre-defined filters matching conditions of interest and one for author country affiliation.
👉 Learn more about querying review results in : Searching Inside a Review
When assessment workflows require the monitoring of only a subset of publications (ex: for a given coutry or region) the Monitor can be configured to automatically filter based on a list. Biologit will automatically filters articles based on the list.
Source filters are available inside the Filter tab of monitor configuration and allow users to create a pre-defined list of relevant sources:
Relevance of an article is defined based on the ISSN of the publication, and an article is considered relevant if ISSN is present in the configuration list. Otherwise, article is marked as non-relevant and is automatically excluded.
If source filters are configured for a monitor used inside a review, relevant articles would will stay in "In Queue" tab, while non-relevant ones will be moved to "Reviewed" tab and marked with a respective comment:
Learn more about tabs used in MLM-AI reviews in Review Details - Tabs.
If additional data entry fields are required to complete the assessment, they can be configured as Annotations:
Annotations are shown to users under the "Annotations" tab in Article Details. Saving a decision will also save any entered annotation data
Annotations are visible as additional columns in the Excel export and the Article summary in HTML
Annotations allow for free text or drop down (single or multiple choice)
Example:
Custom screening workflows can be configured at monitor level. See the Custom Workflows page for more details.
