Seeking Help to Maintain the OpenMRS Evidence Hub

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Dear Community,

I would love for 1 or more members to help me maintain our OpenMRS Evidence Hub (https://om.rs/evidence). This is a great project for any students or volunteers looking for a non-code but high-impact contribution area!

The Problem:

  • Problem #1: Adding New Articles: Amazingly, there are several new publications every month coming out that involve OpenMRS. TBH I struggle to keep the Wiki page up to date as the new publications come out, so even though the page is showing numerous items from 2024, this is only a small sample of all the new articles in 2024 that involve OpenMRS!
  • Problem #2: Adding Old Articles (lower priority): There are literally thousands of publications from pre-2020. I’ve only added a few popular ones to that wiki page, but there are likely other high-value, high-interest publications that should be highlighted there. I’d love for someone to do a historical literature review and add articles that seem especially important or insightful.

Estimated Contribution Time/Month: 1-4 hours

What the Process Involves: Here is the process I go through to update the page with the new articles as they come in:

  1. Sign up for Google Scholar alerts to your inbox at https://scholar.google.com/scholar_alerts. Use the search term “openmrs”. This ensures that you will get an email alert for any article that mentions “openmrs” or a similar term.
  2. Review the email: Sometimes it is a false-alarm (e.g. sometimes you’ll get alerts for a totally unrelated system called “openMS”). You can ignore these.
  3. Review the publication: If the alert looks like it really involves OpenMRS, open up the publication and see if it looks like it is from a legitimate source (such as a formal journal, reputable conference, or other trusted source like a Ministry of Health or implementing organization). Then, see if the article actually mentions anything of substance about OpenMRS. For example, if the article only mentions OpenMRS as a source in a footnote, this is not sufficient to be added to our Evidence page. The article should contribute some interesting knowledge to the OpenMRS community of implementers, developers, or researchers. Sometimes the article might be about some particular disease research, or open source processes, or eHealth leadership, or even cybersecurity practices.
  4. Add to the Wiki page following the table template.
    • The most important part here is the “Themes” so that people can quickly find articles of interest to them, or at least, proof that OpenMRS has had impact in multiple areas. (For example, since there is a myth that OpenMRS is only for HIV care (incorrect!), it was important for us to show articles from other disease areas, such as Oncology, Endocrinology, and more.)
    • Use APA formatting (guidelines here, free generator here), as this is often the formatting standard that healthcare researchers expect, and thus communicates professionalism.
  5. Bonus: If you thought the article had an extra interesting quote or general finding, share that quote or note in the table for easy reference!

Let me know if anyone is interested :smiley: What would be even better is if there was some way we could automate this, without ingesting irrelevant or unhelpful articles.

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@grace Sounds like something worth wile doing - as you can see we are part way through an implementation at the moment but once we are through I’d be happy to share lessons learned and that sort of thing.

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:raised_hand: Would be glad to pitch in @grace

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Am available to contribute/support too… @grace

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It may be worthwhile conducting a recursive search for evidence created prior to 2015 and inviting the authors to contribute to the evidence repository. The current evidence base from before 2015 is not well represented. A quick Google Scholar search reveals several articles related to OpenMRS. This could be an excellent activity for a junior team member interested in contributing non-technically. They could audit both what is available on Google Scholar and what is currently in the evidence repository. Following this, they could send out invitations to the authors of those papers to have their work added to our evidence library.

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I am willing to help @grace , et al. Thanks for the reminder about this resource.

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I would like to work on this!

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Thank you so much everyone for your offers to help! Very nice idea @oliebolz about contacting researchers directly. And of course we’d love to hear your lessons learned from your implementation, publication or not!

Thank you @ball for kicking things off with your addition of this article - this is a perfect example of contributing to this page :slight_smile:

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And then @wodpachua thank you so much for already adding numerous other studies already - your notes/summaries are really helpful too!!! Perfect!! I’m very touched and appreciative :bouquet: :pray: :clap: :muscle: Way to go Moses!! I had not yet seen some of these studies and I’m moved seeing these and hearing about the results. A powerful reminder about the impact of our community!! Keep up the great work.

One last thing I did not mention above is that I’ve been deferring to use APA formatting (guidelines here, free generator here), as this is often the formatting standard that healthcare researchers expect. I’ll update the above instructions to include that :slight_smile:

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