Qualitative Synthesis presents the results of your Extraction (previously named Tagging) in an interactive visual. You can use it to drill down on the qualitative content of underlying studies, and it should be used in combination with the screening outputs on the PRISMA diagram and the meta-analytical results displayed in Quantitative Synthesis.

From the Nest menu, click on “Synthesis” in the left hand menu.

Click on the “Qualitative Synthesis” box.

Sunburst is an interactive feature that allows you to explore all tags within a Nest. Explore using the following functions:

Hovering over each segment shows you the full tag name.

• Click on Sunburst segments: To filter the list of Associated Studies (red brackets) on the right, click any segment of the Sunburst diagram. If you select multiple segments, the filters will be stacked– that is, only records with BOTH tags applied will be presented in the study list.
  • Clearing selection: You can clear all tags selected by clicking “Clear Selection” in the upper left.
  • Frequently Co-occuring Tags: First red arrow above. Once you select segment(s), a list of the most commonly-occurring tags will automatically pop up under Tag Search.
  • View Tag Statistics: Second red arrow above. The Tag Statistics box shows the number of studies associated with the most recently selected tag, as well as that tag & its descendants.
  • View Excerpts: Toggle from Tag Statistics to Excerpts (red arrow pointing left) to see the tag text excerpts associated with studies based on your most recently selected tag.
• Use Tag Search: Alternatively, if you cannot find the tag you want to filter by, use the Tag Search (upper right) to select the segment of interest.
  • Note: Tag Search is located in the upper right, under “Tag Name” (black arrow). Once a tag is selected, as is shown in this image, the Tag Search menu displays the most recently selected tag.

• Zoom: Qualitative Synthesis Zoom functions by 'drilling down' on tags of interest. To switch from “Filtering” to “Zooming” on segments of the sunburst diagram, toggle to “Zoom” in the upper right of the page:

Then, select the tag that you would like to be the new 'inner ring' of your sunburst. In the example above, selecting “Outcomes” makes it the new inner ring, with all sub-tags displayed in the next ring:

This Zooming action can be done iteratively– that is, selecting any tag below “Outcomes” in the example above would make that new tag the inner ring.

When you are finished Zooming in, you can:

• Filter: To switch back to Filtering the Zoomed-in sunburst, toggle to “Filter” in the upper right; or
• Clear Zoom: To Zoom out to the full sunburst, click “Clear Zoom” in the upper left.

Since the order of segments shown on the sunburst reflects the order of tags in the tagging hierarchy, you may wish to reorder these tags. See instructions on how to Reorder Tags.

If you wish to hide tags in Synthesis, see instructions here. Tags will only be hidden in Synthesis and will still be present in AutoLit.

Share or Embed your Qualitative Synthesis page by clicking the Share icon in the upper right (see instructions).

If you Share or Embed directly from the Qualitative Synthesis page, you will share this page directly; however, if link-shared, recipients will be able to view all Synthesis pages.

In QLS only, you can download a curated spreadsheet of filtered studies and all tags reported using the “Share” function. In the upper right, click the “Share” button, under the “File” menu, click “Download Filtered Studies.”

Note: If no tags are selected, the spreadsheet will contain all studies and all tags. If certain tags are selected, the spreadsheet will only contain those filtered studies and their tags.

You can also view and share our interactive output in the form of a dendrogram, which closely mirrors the tagging hierarchy in AutoLit. You can toggle between the two forms using the icons in the bottom right corner:

All features remain the same as in the sunburst, the only difference is the presentation.

Note: You can share and download filtered studies, but you cannot embed with this format currently.

In both the sunburst and dendrogram view, when you click on a tag, you can view the associated studies on the right hand side. When clicking on a specific study, you can view the abstract, quantitative data, tags and searches corresponding to that study.

In the “Tags” tab, you can see a list of all tags and their contents. If your nest contains tags with table contents, the table will be shown here. However, this data can be exported in Study Inspector.