Guidance on terminology, application, and reporting of citation searching: the TARCiS statement
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Evidence syntheses adhering to systematic literature searching techniques are a cornerstone of evidence based healthcare. Beyond term based searching in electronic databases, citation searching is a prevalent search technique to identify relevant sources of evidence. However, for decades, citation searching methodology and terminology has not been standardised. An evidence guided, four round Delphi consensus study was conducted with 27 international methodological experts in order to develop the Terminology, Application, and Reporting of Citation Searching (TARCiS) statement. TARCiS comprises 10 specific recommendations, each with a rationale and explanation on when and how to conduct and report citation searching in the context of systematic literature searches. The statement also presents four research priorities, and it is hoped that systematic review teams are encouraged to incorporate TARCiS into standardised workflows.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it