clbustos / buhos

Web based platform to manage complete process of systematic literature reviews. Developed using Sinatra, a Ruby-based DSL.

Features

• Multi-platform: Runs on Linux (tested on Ubuntu 14.04, 16.06, 18.4 and 21.04), Windows (tested on Windows 7 and 10) and MacOS (tested on High Sierra)
• Supports individual and group-based systematic reviews.
• Internal messaging system for personal messages o messages related to systematic reviews.
• Internationalization, using I18n. Available in English and Spanish.
• Flexible work-flow. The main stages of text searching, screening relevant articles, data extraction and reporting are clearly defined. However, changes can be made at any stage already finalized, and will automatically reflect in subsequent stages.
• Imports information from various bibliographic databases, such as - WoS, Scopus, Ebscohost, Scielo, Pubmed - using BibTeX.
• Integration with Crossref allows deduplication of articles (using DOI), and searching for information on references
• File repository. PDF and ODF file viewing support online via ViewerJS.
• Multiple ways to analyze data: comments and tagging at each stage of review, and generation of customized forms for information extraction.
• Various report types: For data extracted from texts, detailed reports on the decision process at each review stage, as well as a PRISMA flow diagram for process overviews, ready for publication.
• Different export file types: Can export references as BibTeX and generate GraphML, to graph relations between papers.
• Unit and integration tests for main software features. See https://buhos.org/api/file.rspec.html .

Using Kitchenham & Chartes (2007), Buhos support the 'conducting the review' phase in full, and have partial support for other stages:

Planning the review

Conducting the review

Reporting the review

Documentation

There is a user manual available in English and Spanish with a quick guide for understanding the systematic review methodology that supports the software.

The API is documented using Yard and is available on https://www.buhos.org/api. Only available in English.

Get Started

There is a demo available on https://demo.buhos.org. You could use the software using 'admin' as username and password. Don't do anything important here, because the database is refreshed periodically.

On Windows

The installer for Windows, can be obtained from Buhos Windows Toolkit

On *nix

For Debian, Ubuntu and CentOS, packages and installation instructions are available on packager.io. For example, to install Buhos on Ubuntu follow the instructions below, using localhost:4567 as URL.

wget -qO- https://dl.packager.io/srv/clbustos/buhos/key | sudo apt-key add -
sudo wget -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/buhos.list \ 
  https://dl.packager.io/srv/clbustos/buhos/master/installer/ubuntu/16.04.repo
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install buhos
sudo buhos config:set PORT=4567
sudo buhos scale web=1
sudo buhos restart

Using vagrant

On vendor/vagrant_alpine and vendor/vagrant_ubuntu_16 directories, working vagrant configurations for Alpine and Ubuntu 16.04 can be found, respectively. They can be run using

> vagrant up

By default, the application is configured to run on port 4567.

Using source code (latest)

Prerequisites

On Linux, a ruby 2.4 or 2.5 installation with bundler is needed, and development libraries for MySQL and SQLite. We recommend using RVM.

On Ubuntu, the following script installs all required dependencies:

# Update system
apt-get update
apt-get upgrade -y

apt-get install -y \
  cloc \
  gdal-bin \
  gdebi-core \
  git \
  libcurl4-openssl-dev \
  libgdal-dev \
  libproj-dev \
  libxml2-dev \
  ghostscript \
  imagemagick \
  xpdf \
  build-essential \
  libmysqlclient-dev \
  libsqlite3-dev

# Install RVM

gpg --keyserver hkp://keys.gnupg.net \
      --recv-keys 409B6B1796C275462A1703113804BB82D39DC0E3
curl -sSL https://get.rvm.io | bash -s $1

On alpine, the basic configuration is

apk update
apk upgrade
apk --update add --virtual \
    build-dependencies \
    ruby-dev \
    build-base \
    ruby \
    libffi-dev \
    libxml2-dev \
    libxslt-dev \
    mariadb-dev \
    sqlite-dev \
    ruby-json \
    ruby-bigdecimal \
    ruby-etc    

Once all the dependencies are installed, the source code can be copied using

git clone [email protected]:clbustos/buhos.git

Install required Ruby dependencies using bundler

bundle install

And run the application using

ruby app.rb

or

rackup

Post-install configuration

The app uses a web-based configuration. Once the server starts, point your browser by default to localhost:4567 to begin the installation process.

If you wish to use a MySQL database, you should create it before configuring the sofware. Using the MySQL root user, the instructions would be:

CREATE DATABASE buhos;
CREATE USER buhos_user@localhost IDENTIFIED BY 'password';
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON buhos.* TO buhos_user@localhost;
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

First, the installation language should be defined. Second, information on the specific database should be provided (SQLite / MySQL). By default, a SQLite database will be installed in db.sqlite. If you have a SCOPUS API key, the relevant information can be submitted along with the proxy settings, if applicable. As the final step, the database will be populated. You must restart the application before using it.

Deployment

Individual users can run the application smoothly with the Windows installer or the packages for Ubuntu, Debian or CentOS.

For multiple online users, the use of Buho has been tested deployed on an independent HTTP server, using Passenger as connector with Nginx. MySQL has been used for the database. In theory, the software should work smoothly on MariaDB and Apache.

A typical nginx configuration should look like this:

server {
  listen 80
  root /home/<user>/<base_dir>;
  passenger_enabled on;
  passenger_ruby <ruby_location>
}

The location of the Ruby executable can be obtained with

> which ruby

If you are using RVM with Passenger, check this page

Caveats

Since October 2018, ImageMagick have strict policies to convert pdf to images. If you need to parse pdf as images in Buhos (rarely needed), or test the software using the specification suite, check this Stack Overflow entry.

Built With

• Sinatra - Sinatra is a DSL for quickly creating web applications on Ruby with minimal effort.
• Sequel - Sequel is a simple, flexible, and powerful SQL database access toolkit for Ruby. It offers an abstraction layer and ORM functionalities, among other things.
• Bootstrap - Bootstrap is an open source toolkit for developing with HTML, CSS, and JS.
• jQuery - jQuery is a fast, small, and feature-rich JavaScript library.
• ViewerJS - ViewerJS enables online viewing of PDF and ODT files.
• RubyMine - An excellent Ruby IDE

Contributing

If you wish to contribute, email clbustos_at_gmail.com. If you'd like to send a patch, best is to create a fork of the repository on github and make a pull request.

Versioning

We use SemVer for versioning. To see the available versions, see the tags on this repository.

Authorship

Developers

• Claudio Bustos - Main developer - clbustos

Contributions

• Daniel Lermanda - Web page designer and UX advisor
• María Gabriela Morales - First conceptualization and revision of the manual
• Liz Medina - English translation of home page and manual.
• Alejandro Díaz, Pedro Salcedo: Development of user requirement specifications.
• Anna Hawrot: Polki (polish) translation

Citation

If you use this software for your research, please cite the following paper:

Bustos, C., Morales, M.G., Salcedo, P., & Díaz, Alejandro (2018). Buhos: A web-based systematic literature review management software. SoftwareX, 7, 360-372. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.softx.2018.10.004

License

This project is licensed under the BSD 3-Clause License - See LICENSE file for details.