Hi, I'm Zor. Welcome to Unisor Education. Today I would like to continue talking about partial derivatives and what exactly the usage of them in researching the behavior of the functions. This lecture is part of the course of advanced mathematics for teenagers and high school students. It's presented on Unisor.com. And if you are watching this lecture from any other source, like from YouTube directly for instance, I do suggest you to switch to Unisor because it actually has the link exactly to the same lecture. But at the same time, you will have notes for every lecture, very detailed notes can be used as a textbook. And for certain topics, there are exams, so if you would like to be challenged, just do the exams. The site is free, by the way, and there are no even advertisements, so you're completely free with one-on-one with the studying. Alright, so now before talking about partial derivatives, let me just remind you one of the probably the main usage of the regular derivatives. Now you remember that if you have something like a local extreme maximum in this particular case or minimum, then the tangential line is parallel to the x-axis in this particular case. Which means that the first derivative of this function, well considering the function, is smooth enough. So the first derivative of this function in this particular point is equal to zero. And then we're using the second derivative to differentiate between maximum, where the second derivative is negative, because the angle is decreasing. Or in case it's a minimum, the angle is increasing, and that's why at this point, well the first derivative is also equal to zero, but the second derivative is positive. And then if the second derivative is negative, well we can deal with something like this. Remember, y is equal to x-cube. At this point, the first derivative is 3x square, and it's equal to zero, but it's not a minimum, not a maximum, right? It's an inflection point, that's how it's called. Now, I just reminded you this, because in case of the functions of two variables, we have exactly the same situation, but instead of regular derivatives, we will use part-shots. So, let me draw something, and I have to apologize for not being a good artist. So, let me try. Okay, let's consider we have a three-dimensional space to have representation of the function of two arguments, right? So, these are x and y, and this is z. And we're talking about some kind of a function which has, well let's talk about maximum in this particular case. And the way how I will represent it is something like this. So, I hope I have drawn a graph of the function which has a maximum at this particular point. Now, if this is the point of the maximum on the surface, and obviously I'm talking about local maximum, right? So, maybe somewhere else it goes, doesn't matter where, but in this particular point, it's a local maximum, which means everything from this point in its immediate neighborhood, maybe small neighborhood, whatever, is lower. The function has a smaller values than in this particular point. So, this is the point which, let's say, a and b. So, the point a and b function is f of x, y. And what I'm saying is that the point a, b is a local maximum, which means f of a, b is greater, well actually strictly greater. It's a real maximum. Greater than f of x, y, where x, y is some kind of neighborhood of a, b. So, if this is a, b, this is some kind of a neighborhood around a, b. And around this neighborhood, for any point x, y within this neighborhood, the value of the function would be less than the value at point a, b. So, this is the point of local maximum. Now, let's talk about partial derivatives. And again, we're assuming the function is smooth enough so partial derivative exists and they are continuous, etc., whatever is necessary. So, let's investigate the behavior, let's say, of the partial derivative of function f of x, y by x. Let's call it g of x, y. Because it's a function, right? Where partial derivative by one of the arguments is still the function of two arguments. So, how actually visualize the partial derivative by x? Well, we are holding y constant, right? So, we are holding y constant at point b in this particular case, that's what we need. And we are cutting our image of our function by a plane which is cutting through this, this is the plane. And the intersection will be one of these functions. Okay, one of these lines. So, let's assume that this is an intersection. This plane, which goes like this basically. Okay, it cuts our graph and this is the intersection. Now, the line which is parallel to x, y plane in this case at this particular point. Will obviously be a tangential line. And since this is the maximum point, right? Because everything we can consider out right now within this plane. And we are talking about only the function of one argument. And obviously, since this is a maximum point for an entire surface, it will be a maximum point within the section, within this plane. So, I have exactly the same situation as in case of the function of one argument. Which means my tangential line should be parallel to this line. Or basically the whole plane doesn't really matter, right? And it implies that my first derivative which is actually a tangent of this line should be equal to zero, right? Now, how can I prove it a little bit more rigorously? Well, that's actually very easy because what is a derivative?  As delta x goes to zero, right? That's with my partial derivative by x at this particular point. At point where I'm actually looking for this maximum point, right? Now, this is always negative, right? In the neighborhood of point AB. Why? Because, well, actually I can put y is equal to b in this case. Because we're looking about, we're looking at the partial derivative at point AB, right? So, y is equal to b, it's fixed. And from a, we go slightly by delta x. And we have this difference between the values of the function divided by difference in argument. Now, this is negative because f of AB is the maximum point. So, if we step from the left to the left or to the right by x, which means here or here, within this line. If we will step from the point A, we will only decrease the value of the function. So, this is negative. Now, this is, if we go to the left, would be negative. If we go to the right, would be positive. So, the ratio will be either negative on the left or positive on the right. Which means it should reach zero exactly at point AB. Now, similarly, we can fix the x and have the function h of x, y is a partial derivative by y at point AB. Now, what is that? Well, this is a limit f of A now is fixed, but B is incremented. Exactly the same thing, f of AB is the maximum within the neighborhood of A and B. Which means this would be smaller, so this is negative. And delta x, well, actually, I probably should put delta y. Not that it matters, but since it's incremented by y axis. So, my neighborhood around AB will have the point at AB is the maximum, so this is negative. And delta y, as it goes to zero, delta y, in this particular case, we are going along this from B to the left or to the right. So, from the left, I will have, this is, from the left, left means it's negative, right? So, this is negative and this is negative, so the function would be, the ratio would be positive. And if I switch to the right, the function will be, on top, I will have exactly the same negative. And on the right, I will have positive, so it changes the sign. So, this thing is changing the sign around point AB. Which means at point AB, it must be equal to zero. We are, again, we are considering that the function is smooth enough and the first derivative by y or by x, they are all continuous, right? So, if a continuous function is negative on the left and positive on the right, it should be zero in the middle, right? Okay, so basically that's a more rigorous proof. But from the purely geometrical standpoint, it's also obvious that partial derivatives which represent a tangential line parallel to one of two axis is supposed to be equal to zero. Tangential line is supposed to be parallel, so the partial derivative is supposed to be equal to zero. So, that's basically the kind of analogous situation to the function of one argument. Over there, we have one single derivative which is equal to zero at the point of maximum or minimum or inflection. And in this particular case, as I have just demonstrated with the maximum and it can be absolutely the same way demonstrated with the minimum, both partial derivatives are equal to zero. Now, let me now talk about necessary and sufficient conditions. Again, as in the case with functions of one argument, equality of the first derivative to zero is not a sufficient condition for maximum or minimum. Because as I was saying before, it can be an inflection point like y is equal to x cubed where the derivative is equal to zero at this point. Same thing in this case, in the case of functions of two arguments, it's a necessary condition. So, if the function is reaching its maximum, then the partial derivatives are equal to zero. Or if it's minimum, it's also, but it's not a sufficient condition for either of those because there might be mixed cases when the function has something which we call a saddle point. So, let me just explain what saddle point is. It's an equivalent of inflection for functions of one argument, but now we have two arguments. And again, I should really apologize for my artistic representation of the saddle point. It's really not easy, but if you can imagine how the saddle really looks. Okay, so let me talk about the saddle. Well, let's consider that we have a horse. Oh, this is the horse. Does it look like a horse? Okay, that's not the case. The case is a saddle on it. Saddle has very interesting property. It goes around the horse, right? So, it goes here and on that side of the horse. But whenever we want to sit, we have a little bit raising here and here, right? But if we look from the top, then the situation will be like this. If this is the horse body, then my surface goes like this around the horse, but like this for the person to sit on it, right? So, it's not a maximum or minimum because in this direction, I mean, if I will cut it this way, I will have the maximum point. But if I will cut it this way, I will have minimum point. So, this is basically a combination of this, if I can say so. So, in the vertical section perpendicular to this direction, I will have the maximum, but if I will have the section parallel to horse body, I will have this. So, that's what saddle actually is. And this is a very interesting surface because it has actually both partial derivatives equal to zero, exactly equivalently as the inflection point in case of function of one argument. And there are many examples of this and one of the examples which I have will be exactly like this. So, now the next question is minimum or maximum or a saddle point. I mean, how can they differentiate? Now, you remember that with the functions of one argument, we were using the second derivative. If my second derivative was positive and the first, obviously, we are talking about first derivative is equal to zero at point x is equal to a. So, in this case, we are talking about minimum. If my first derivative is zero at x is equal to a, but the second derivative is positive, then we are talking about maximum. Because again, here, in case of a minimum, our tangential line is, in case of minimum, it's like this, right? So, tangential line is increasing the angle, but in case of maximum, tangential line decreasing. So, this is monotonically increasing and that's why the second, this function is monotonically increasing and that's why the second derivative is positive. In this case, the first derivative is monotonically decreasing. Maximum is this. Maximum is this and minimum is, no, vice versa. So, again, my first derivative is equal to zero at this point, but around this point, since it's a maximum, it's decreasing the angle. If it's a decreasing function, then the second derivative is negative. In this case, my minimum is, so it reaches the zero at point of the minimum, but the angle is increasing. For increasing function, my second derivative is positive. Now, there is an equivalent of this type of research done with the help of the second derivative. There is an equivalent for functions of two arguments and here it is. And unfortunately, I cannot really prove it because it's rather involved, but it's a criteria. Let's put it this way. It's a very important criteria. Well, let's calculate the following thing. I will use the same symbol, delta, but it's not the same as before when I was incrementing the arguments. Now it's just basically an expression which I'm going to present to you. Okay, here it is. It's a second derivative by x times second derivative by y minus mixed derivative. So, this is much more complicated expression. Now in this case, just second derivative. In this case, since we have two variables, we have two different second derivatives, and this expression which combines together all second derivatives. Second derivative by x, second derivative by y. I should have put here. And second derivative by a mixture, first by x and then by y, or first by y and then by x. It doesn't really matter, right? So, whenever you are calculating this particular expression, you can use it to differentiate between minimum and maximum and saddle point. And here is the criteria. Now if this delta is less than zero, it's a saddle point. If this is greater than zero, it's max or minimum. Now how to differentiate between max and minimum? This. If my second derivative by x is greater than zero, it's minimum. If it's less than zero, it's maximum. So, why x and not y? Well, actually it doesn't really matter because they have the same sign. Otherwise, if they have different signs, then this thing is definitely negative, right? Because this will be negative and this minus of positive because it's a square, so it will be negative. So if this is positive, it means they have the same sign. Second derivative by x and second derivative by y. Either of them can serve in this particular case. I can put dx2 or dy2. It's the same thing. Both of them are simultaneously greater or simultaneously less than zero to make delta positive. So these are the criteria. And again, I'm sorry I cannot prove that this is exactly the valid criteria, but I can illustrate it with examples. Let me go to examples. So I have two examples. One of them has maximum and another has a settle point. So my function is, okay, let's start from interpreting this graphically. Now, obviously, whenever x and y, they are both squares, so it's always positive, which means that the minimum value of this of the denominator would be when both of them are zero. And if they are growing, then denominator growing. Now, since it's a denominator, the whole fraction would do in reverse. So at x and y equal to zero, we will have maximum. And as x and y go to infinity, then we will have the whole function growing to zero. So basically, it looks like this. It's like a hat, basically, right? With smooth lines. Now, obviously, this is the point of a maximum. So let's check if our criteria are basically do whatever we are saying they're supposed to do. Well, first of all, derivatives. Now, the first derivative by x is equal to, now, this is, y is fixed, x is a variable. So this is one over something. So it would be minus this something square, right? And then, inner function would be derivative of this, which is 2x. So that's my first derivative. Now, my first derivative by y is equal to absolutely similarly. Okay, when are they equal to zero? Well, the denominator is not equal to zero at all, so it's always positive. So the only value is x is equal to zero and y is equal to zero. That's the point where my both partial derivatives are equal to zero. Now, let's talk about second derivative. Well, actually, not just second derivative, but second derivatives. We need all the second derivatives. So we need second derivative by x square, which is derivative of this by x. All right? So what I will do is I consider it as a product of minus 2x and one over. So as a product, I have to put 2x times derivative of this thing. One over this expression square. Now, that would be minus one over this expression to the force times derivative of the inner function times, now this is the square of something. So it's 2 times this times derivative of what's inside. I'm using chain rule again and again and again, times 2x. So what do we have as a result? Well, this is plus 6x square and this would be 1 plus x square plus y square to the third, right? Am I right? I'm not sure. Did I do it right? Let me just think again. This is x times, okay, that's correct. Now, and then I have to add to this whatever I have here, times the derivative of this. So it would be minus 2 divided by 1 plus x square plus y square. So again, let me just explain what I did. How to differentiate this? I consider it minus 2x times one over this thing square. It's like a product, which means it's first times derivative of the second plus second times derivative of the first, right? So the first component minus 2x times derivative of one over this thing square, which is minus to the fourth degree times derivative of the inner, which is 2 this, and times derivative of inner this, which means this. And plus, I have to have derivative of this one multiplied by one over this thing square. So derivative of the 2x would be minus 2, and this remains the same. Now, if I will use the common denominator, so I have to multiply this by 1 plus x square plus y square, it would be 6x square minus 2 minus 2x square minus 2y square, divided by 1 plus x square plus y square to the third. Is that right? I have slightly different result. Oh, that's 8, that's why. It's not 6, it's 8, because it's 2, 2 and 2. So now I have 6, 8 instead of 6, or 6x square minus 2y square minus 2 divided by 1 plus x square plus y square. Okay, now this corresponds to whatever I have now. That's good. So let me write it down here. 6x square minus 2y square minus 2 divided by 1 plus x square plus y square to the power of 3. Okay, now let's do the second derivative by y. Well, now here I will cheat a little bit, because they are kind of symmetrical. Instead of x, I should substitute y, and then this will be changed into this. So I will do exactly the same thing. It's 6y square minus 2x square minus 2 divided by this. It's not much of a cheating, actually, because it's obvious, since if we are just substituting instead of xy instead of yx, x square plus y square will be exactly the same, but in this I will have this, or from this I will have this. So that's why I symmetrically changed x to y and got exactly the same thing. And the third component we have to calculate is second derivative by a mixture. So I have to differentiate, let's say, this by y or this by x doesn't really matter. Now, if I will differentiate this by y, for instance, minus 2x is a constant, right? So it's remained without change. And then I have to calculate basically the derivative by y of this thing, which is 1 over this thing to the fourth with a minus sign, right? Times, times, inner function would be 2 times 1 plus x square plus y square times 2y, which is equal to minus and minus plus 2, 2 and 2 is 8xy divided by 1 plus x square plus y square. This is fourth and this is one, this is numerator, this is denominator, so it's 3. That's it. So I have all three second derivatives. By the way, again, this is symmetrical relative to x and y, as it's supposed to be, right? Because d2 by dx dy should be equal to d2 by dy dx. And since we have a function which is symmetrical in the very beginning, then we should have it symmetrical as well, because it's by x and by y. Okay, so these three components. Now, what should we do? We have to do multiply this by this and minus this square, right? So what will that be? At point x is equal to 0 and y is equal to 0, right? So now we can just substitute x0 and y0 and what do we have? Well, we have minus 2. Everything else is 0, minus 2, because everything else is 0 and 0. If x and y is equal to 0. So it's multiplication of this by this, which is minus 2 times minus 2, minus square of this, which is 0 square, which is equal to 4. It's positive. And since it's positive, as we have just told before, we have either minimum or maximum, but not the saddle point. If it's negative, it's a saddle point. But if it's positive, it's minimum or maximum. Now, what is it, minimum or maximum? And the recipe says, pay attention to the sign of the second derivative by one of the arguments, this or this. And it's negative. And since the second derivative is negative, then we are talking about maximum as we had on the picture. So that's it. That's the whole research using the second derivatives. So again, my first derivative is used to find out where exactly is a stationary point. Stationary point is where my both derivatives are equal to 0. I don't remember if I told you this terminology, stationary point. That's where both derivatives are equal to 0. Okay, second is about the saddle point, actually. So my function is x times y. Now, I don't dare even to start drawing this thing. It's kind of complicated, the saddle. It looks very simple, but it's really kind of difficult to draw. But on unizor.com in the notes, I have actually all the pictures. Maximum, minimum, saddle point, and in particular this function is also graphed over there. So let's do it basically using the apparatus of calculus. My first derivative, but in this case, it's much easier than the previous. My first derivative by x is equal to y. My first derivative by y is equal to x. Now, when are they both equal to 0? Well, again, obviously at point 0, 0. Now, we need the second derivatives to find out what exactly this is. Now, the second derivative is this by x is equal to 0. Because by x, and this is the constant, y is supposed to be constant. Same thing, df by dy square. Because this is x, we are differentiating by y. So it's also 0. And the mixture, oh, that's not the mixture. This is the mixture. So first by y, we get x, and then by x, we get 1. Or vice versa. First by x, we get y, and then by y, we get 1 again. As usually, they are supposed to be the same. And now, this time, this minus this square. So 0 times 0 minus 1 square, which is equal to minus 1. Negative, this delta is negative, which signifies that this guy, this function, has a saddle point at 0. And it's kind of understood, because if you will look at this function from both x and y positive, you will have that it obviously grows this way. And let's say you're going along x, y, z. So if you go along this line, so at this point, it's equal to 0. Now, along this way, if you're increasing both x and y positive, function is increasing, so function would be growing. Now, if you continue this bisector to both negative, when both negative, it will also grow, so it will go to this. So if you will cut it along the plane, which is bisecting this angle between x and y and going through the z axis. So going through the z axis and dissect the x, y angle, you will get this type of things. Now, if you go in a perpendicular direction along this plane, so it's going, the plane goes through z, but it bisecting a different angle between positive y and negative x. Well, if one of them positive and other is negative, then the result will be negative. And the more absolute value the further we go along this particular thing, it will go down. So it goes up here and down there. So that's what actually explains the saddle point. And again, it's a saddle point based on these calculations as well. Okay, so that's it. I do recommend you to take a look at the Unisor.com. This particular lecture, it has nice pictures, which I have borrowed, obviously, from the web. And it makes actually your understanding of all these concepts a little bit better. Now, what I didn't really do and I kind of feel sorry about this, I did not prove that this time, this minus square of this gives you a good indication of whether it's a maximum or minimum or saddle point and how to use the second derivative to differentiate between maximum and minimum. Well, I will check again. Maybe I will present this particular proof in writing in one of the... But you can probably always find it on the Internet anyway. All right, so that's it for today. Thank you very much and good luck.


The next item of business is topical questions, and at question number one, I call Stuart McMillan. Thank you, Presiding Officer, to ask the Scottish Government what assistance it can provide to the investigation into the capsizing of the tugboat MB Bighter on the River Clyde on the 24th of February. Minister, Mary McCallan. I should like to begin by extending mine and the Scottish Government as a whole our sincere sympathies and condolences to the families and friends of those who have lost loved ones in this incident. I should also like to put on record my thanks to first responders on the scene for their actions during this tragic incident. I know that the community will be in shock. I know that there will be a lot of people who wish to understand what has happened, most of all those who are mourning. The investigation of marine incidents involving the loss of vessels, it is a reserve matter led by the Marine Accident Investigation Branch of the UK Department for Transport, and they are currently investigating the cause of the capsizing of MB Bighter. Meanwhile, the Maritime and Coast Guard Agency are supporting the Port Authority to deal with any salvage and counter pollution response. Scottish Government officials have been advising the Maritime and Coast Guard Agency with respect to any potential environmental impact. Although Scottish Government officials have not been asked to support the Marine Accident Investigation Branch and its investigatory work, and as a routine, we would not be expected to do so, the Cabinet Secretary for Rural Affairs and myself have asked our officials to keep us very much up to date with all relevant developments, and I wish to offer the Scottish Government as a whole a commitment to any support that we can offer. Stuart McMillan. I thank the minister for that reply, and I want to put in record my condolences to the families that affected by this incident, and also my thank you to the emergency services for their swift response on Friday. Can the minister give an assurance that the Scottish Government will provide any assistance required to help with the recovery of the vessel? Minister. Yes, thank you, Presiding Officer, and I should say that I'm grateful to Stuart McMillan for raising this question today. I know that it's something that he will be deeply involved in with his constituency. I would absolutely confirm Scottish Government officials. We, as I said previously, have been advising that the Maritime and Coast Guard Agency with respect to that point about environmental impacts and, in turn, the Maritime and Coast Guard Agency are supporting the port authority as it works to do any counter-pollution and also to provide support to any recovery attempt. As I noted in my previous answer, that's all happening, while the Marine Accident Investigation Branch of the Department for Transport is investigating the capsizing. The Cabinet Secretary for Rural Affairs and I will be keeping very closely abreast of that, and again, I reiterate any support, all support, that the Scottish Government can offer. Mr Stuart McMillan. I thank the minister for that. The minister touched upon the shock in the community, and the community is deeply shocked by that tragedy. I have many, many questions as to how that happened, and clearly that's what the investigations will, hopefully, uncover in the months ahead. Does the minister acknowledge, however, the excellent network of third sector organisations in Inverclyde who provide emotional support and also a safe space for people, and that they will be all the more important to my constituents and my community in the weeks and months ahead as the community comes to term with this tragedy? Absolutely, Presiding Officer, and Stuart McMillan makes an excellent point. On behalf of the Government, I would like to once again acknowledge the work of first responders, but equally, as Stuart McMillan highlights, the work of volunteers in the third sector in response to this tragic accident, I'd like to thank everybody involved for their efforts at this difficult time. I know that that will be on-going in the community, and I should, as well as offering to keep updated with this matter to offer any support that the Scottish Government can provide. I would also offer to keep in touch with Stuart McMillan with any helpful offers of support that the Scottish Government can give him in his constituency role. There's very little to add by way of condolence that's already been said by other members, and those benches certainly pass on our sympathies and thoughts to all those affected by this tragedy off the shores of Greenock. Last week, it brought back very painful memories of the 2007 tragedy of a similar nature, and I know that the community will pull together in these circumstances. My only other question in addition to the third sector support that is on offer to people in the community is what specific or direct immediate support could Scottish Government agencies offer the families, friends and colleagues of the two crewmen who were sadly lost. Thank you, Presiding Officer. Jamie Greene is quite right to reiterate those points as regards the family and friends who are now mourning. The Scottish Government will be very happy to offer them support and, indeed, the support networks around them who I know will be critical in the following days. I should say that we are still at a sensitive point where Police Scotland have not yet formally released the identity of the individuals, although their families have been notified. Once we get past that formality in the process, I should be very glad to understand how we can support the family and the folks who will be supporting them. On behalf of those benches, can I associate myself with the comments of Strimwick Millan and Jamie Greene on the tragedy in Greenock on Friday? I spent yesterday, indeed, at New Parrish Church in Port Glasgow, where a space for reflection had been provided to local people to ensure that they could have time to channel what is a palpable sense of grief in the local community. How will she ensure that messages about marine safety and ensuring that local people have confidence in what is happening on the river get out and about in the community and a community as close as Greenock? Paul O'Kane's use of that palpable sense of grief is absolutely right and very accurately depicts how the community will be feeling. For our part, the Scottish Government is very keen that we allow the space for the marine accident investigation branch, the part of the department for transport, to do the work that it needs to do on investigating the capsizing, but that work on the ground of supporting the community, of supporting those who will support the community, we very much see as something that we can be involved in. As I have offered to Strimwick Millan, I would extend that to Paul O'Kane to let me know how you best think that we can do that, and I should certainly be happy to consider any and all offers of support. To ask the Scottish Government whether it will provide an update on when the deposit return scheme will launch. Scotland's deposit return scheme remains on course to launch on 16 August this year. I continue to urge producers to begin their registration for the scheme if they haven't already and to contact the scheme administrator Circularity Scotland as soon as possible for advice. The launch of a scheme of this complexity that every single person in Scotland will participate in isn't easy, but it is significant and it is transformational. I am grateful to businesses of all sizes that are continuing to make good progress as they prepare for launch in August of this year. Maurice Golden. I thank the minister for that answer, but however much the minister wants to pretend otherwise, the reality is that a delay is now almost inevitable at some point. The question is, do we take an informed and workable pause to rescue the scheme or wait for the Scottish Government's staggering level of incompetence to force us into a messy delay? When the deadline for producer registration runs out at midnight, we pass a point of no return. A workable pause then becomes extremely difficult because businesses will be liable for a delay, even though it is through no fault of their own. Businesses need urgent assurance, so can the minister confirm three points? How many producers have signed up? How will the minister ensure that businesses are not held liable for a delay? Has the application for an internal market exemption been officially submitted? The member is confusing today's deadline with producers becoming liabilities with the scheme. Those are two separate matters. Today's deadline is for producers to register with the scheme. The scheme would go live on August 16, and the member is confusing liabilities around that delay, which may have been discussed in the press. I can absolutely confirm that the Scottish Government has been following the agreed process to seek the exclusion of the DRS regulations from the Internal Markets Act. This has been the subject of discussion with the UK Government beginning in 2021, when we saw a broad exclusion under the Resources and Waste Common Framework, when an exclusion was agreed covering Scotland's single-use plastic regulations. We will continue to press the UK Government for a decision as soon as possible to give businesses the clarity that they need. Thank you, Presiding Officer. That was very helpful, so no other application has not been submitted. Also, for any producers out there, according to the minister, she is guaranteed that the legal agreement that you have signed with Circularity Scotland bears no liability for your business. That is on record. This morning, the minister effectively accused hundreds of businesses of having no credibility. More than 500 businesses signed an open letter to the minister calling for the scheme to be paused. As of MSPs, including myself, and having spent 10 years in the waste management sector, I will not take any lectures from the minister presiding over a car crash. Businesses are staring ruin in the face, while the minister seems to be closing her eyes. Crossing her fingers and hoping for the best. With hours left until registration closes, will the minister now see sense and extend registration to avoid catastrophe? Thank you very much. The member has misrepresented what I have said with respect to the liability in terms of today's deadline. The member also references a letter that is several weeks old from producers. The member is correct in the sense that we are still working through issues with small producers, but the letter that the member refers to is several weeks old and predates the significant work that we have done with small producers, including last week where we have listened to them. We have put in place £22 million of cash flow support, exactly what those businesses were asking for to help them with their day one costs. We have put in place a practical labelling solution, again, exactly what small importers were asking for. We continue to work with small producers to make sure that they can become fully compliant with the scheme for that August 16 launch. I have raised previously craft breweries such as Brought Nails and Troquia Brewery, but I have also raised Rhydon Aqua Glass Recycling Company, all in my constituency. Today I can add Wilner of Wines Ltd, a wine retailer in Peebles, also in my constituency. They are all at a loss with regard to the deposit return scheme. They are all confused by it. How flexible will Circularity Scotland be regarding registrations in these circumstances? Circularity Scotland is here to help. Circularity Scotland is the organisation put together by industry. MSPs will have received a letter from Circularity Scotland in the last week, which details how it is created and gives some examples of some of the industry players that were involved in creating it. Circularity Scotland is there to help businesses comply with the regulations that were passed by the Parliament in 2020. If businesses are confused if they do not understand what they need to do is contact Circularity Scotland to find out how Circularity Scotland can help them to comply. I know that every business is different and that every business has its own concerns. That is why Circularity Scotland is here to help them. I encourage them to do that. Last week, Labour proposed a delay in the introduction for small producers in the scheme, which SNP and Green MSPs voted down. Days later, the minister said that she is now actively considering such a delay. When will the minister make a decision on that request for a delay for small businesses? Is it not in the case that the minister is losing the confidence of small businesses? She has lost the confidence of whoever is going to be the next First Minister, and she is now absolutely losing control of this scheme altogether. I think that the member is not accurate there. Some of the contenders were absolutely supportive of the deposit return scheme. The deposit return scheme has significant support across the board. It was supported by parties in this chamber, and many colleagues have been pushing us to get on with it because of the environmental benefits that it delivers. The asks from small producers have been systematically working through. The number one couple of weeks ago was about the cash flow issue, which we have worked made a proposed solution on, and the labelling issue. The ask on the table right now is around that grace period, and we are seriously considering that and looking into what the implications are. I have been listening all along, and we will be continuing to work with business to bring them into compliance with our legislation as passed by this Parliament in 2020. The finance secretary, who presumably signed off the proposals around the cabinet table, has suggested that, if it implemented, it could lead to economic carnage. In light of the complete breakdown in ministerial responsibility and in order to rebuild confidence within the business community, the wider public and even in the SNP-Green coalition, will the minister now agree to pause to undertake that review and ensure that the proposals brought forward in Scotland command that confidence and can be as successful as we have seen in countries around Europe? Implementing of schemes like our deposit return scheme in Scotland is a challenge wherever that is true, and that has been true for successful schemes around the world. Before they are implemented, they look challenging, and people have to make those adjustments, but after they are in place, people are well understood. The situation where we are today is that hundreds of millions of pounds have been invested by Scottish businesses towards the launch of the programme. Over 500 jobs have either been recruited or are in the process of being recruited. The sorting centres sites have been set up, and the trucks to do the reverse logistics have been ordered. That is all in place moving towards that August 16th deadline. Those businesses that have made that substantial hundreds of millions of pounds, the jobs created in that, those businesses only get their return on investment when the scheme launches. Those businesses are counting on us to do our part to launch the scheme on August 16th, so my role here is to make sure that all businesses in Scotland are able to become compliant and participate in the scheme in a pragmatic and practical way. That is what we are doing. The issue on the table is not around the launch date. It will launch on August 16th. The issue on the table is how we support all businesses in Scotland, especially our small businesses, to fully participate in the system and therefore gain the benefits of the system. Mark Ruskell I ask the minister what impact the continued uncertainty that has been presented by the failure of the UK Government to issue an internal market act exclusion will have on the deposit return scheme. Thank you very much for the question. There is an agreed process between the UK Government and the devolved Governments for excluding certain areas from the internal market act. We first raised the need for an exclusion in 2021, and since then we have had constructive engagement between the Scottish and UK Government over the issue. Concerned by the length of time taken to reach an exclusion on 31 January, the Deputy First Minister wrote to the Chancellor and the Secretary of State for levelling up housing and communities on both the need for a UK Government decision on the application of VAT, which we have now thankfully had, and an AIMA exclusion. We now need the UK Government to issue that exclusion for Scotland's deposit return scheme from the internal market act. Given that those are long-standing plans, we will make an important contribution to our climate change and recycling targets and will give businesses the clarity that they need. I expect a decision from the UK Government on that matter as soon as possible. So today we hear from Lornaud Slater that it is all on track. Yesterday we heard from Hamza Yousif that there needs to be a pause, and Kate Forbes says that there will be carnage, three different ministers, three different positions on DRS. Can the minister confirm that section 2 of the ministerial quote has been suspended with regard to DRS? The member is not accurate with what he said with respect to what Hamza Yousif said. Hamza Yousif has mentioned the grace period that small producers have requested. As I have said to the member here, this is a matter for discussion and consideration, because I want to do everything that we can to help small producers to engage with the scheme. We are working together with industry to launch the scheme on August 16 this year. Cat Jones, director of the Association for the Protection of Rural Scotland, said that we are in the middle of a climate crisis, with litter plaguing our towns and countryside. The price of any further delay or weakening of the deposit return scheme system would, frankly, be unbearable. Does the minister agree? Yes, of course. We have to take bold and ambitious action now to tackle the climate emergency. Our deposit return scheme will launch in August and will be a major part of our efforts to reduce littering, cut emissions and build a more circular economy. Our scheme will reduce littering by a third and increase recycling rates of single-use drinks containers toward 90 per cent. The scheme will reduce CO2 emissions by 4 million tonnes over 25 years, the equivalent of taking 83,000 cars off the road. Myself, Government officials and circularities across Scotland continue to meet regularly with industry to ensure a pragmatic approach to the implementation of DRS. That concludes topical questions. The next item of business is a debate on motion 7.942, in the name of Claire Baker, on behalf of the Economy and Fair Work Committee, on retail and town centres in Scotland. I will give members a moment or two to organise themselves.


There are a few earthly things more beautiful than a university," wrote John Mayfield in his tribute to English universities. And his words are equally true today. He admired the splendid beauty of a university because it was, he said, a place where those who hate ignorance may strive to know, where those who perceive truth may strive to make others see. I have therefore chosen this time and place to discuss a topic on which ignorance too often abounds and the truth too rarely perceived, and that is the most important topic on earth, peace. What kind of a peace do I mean and what kind of a peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war, not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind of peace that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and build a better life for their children, not merely peace for Americans, but peace for all men and women, not merely peace in our time, but peace in all time. We first examine our attitude towards peace itself. Too many of us think it is impossible. Too many think it is unreal, but that is a dangerous, defeatist belief. It leads to the conclusion that war is inevitable, that mankind is doomed, that we are gripped by forces we cannot control. We need not accept that view. Our problems are man-made, therefore they can be solved by man, and man can be as big as he wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings. Man's reason and spirit have often solved the seemingly unsolvable, and we believe they can do it again. Let us focus on a practical, more attainable peace, based not on a sudden revolution in human nature, but on a gradual evolution in human institutions, on a series of concrete actions and effective agreements which are in the interests of all concerned. There is no single simple key to this peace, no grand or magic formula to be adopted by one or two powers. Genuine peace must be the product of many nations, the sum of many acts. It must be dynamic, not static, changing to meet the challenge of each new generation, for peace is a process, a way of solving problems. So let us persevere. Peace need not be impractical, and war need not be inevitable. By defining our goal more clearly, by making it seem more manageable and less remote, we can help all people to see it, to draw hope from it, and to move irresistibly towards it. No government or social system is so evil that its people must be considered as lacking in virtue. As Americans, we find communism profoundly repugnant as a negation of personal freedom and dignity, but we can still hail the Russian people, for there are many achievements in science and space, in economic and industrial growth, in culture, in acts of courage. We must persevere in the search for peace, in the hope that constructive changes within the communist block might bring within reach solutions which now seem beyond us. We must conduct our affairs in such a way that it becomes in the communist interest to agree on a genuine peace, for we can seek a relaxation of tensions without relaxing our God, and for our part we do not need to use threats to prove we are resolute. We do not need to jam foreign broadcasts out of fear our faith will be eroded. We are unwilling to impose our system on any unwilling people, but we are willing and able to engage in peaceful competition with any people on earth. Speaking of other nations, I wish to make one point clear. We are bound to many nations by alliances. These alliances exist because our concern and theirs substantially overlap. Our commitment to defend Western Europe and West Berlin, for example, stands undiminished because of the identity of our vital interests. The United States will make no deal with the Soviet Union at the expense of other nations and other peoples, not merely because they are our partners, but also because their interests and ours converge. Our interests converge, however, not only in defending the frontiers of freedom, but in pursuing the paths of peace. It is our hope and the purpose of Allied policy to convince the Soviet Union that she too should let each nation choose its own future, so long as that choice does not interfere with the choices of others. The Communist drive to impose their political and economic system on others is the primary cause of world tension today, for there can be no doubt that if all nations could refrain from interfering in the self-determination of others, the peace would be much more assured. Our primary long-range interest is general and complete disarmament, designed to take place by stages, permitting parallel political developments to build the new institutions of peace which would take the place of arms. To make clear our good faith and solemn convictions on this matter, I now declare that the United States does not propose to conduct nuclear tests in the atmosphere so long as other states do not do so. We will not be the first to resume. While we proceed to safeguard our national interests, let us also safeguard human interests. And the elimination of war and arms is clearly in the interests of both. No treaty, however much it may be to the advantage of all, however tightly it may be worded can provide absolute security against the risks of deception and evasion. But it can, if it is sufficiently effective in its enforcement and it is sufficiently in the interest of its signers, offer far more security and far fewer risks than an unabated, uncontrolled, unpredictable arms race. The United States, as the world knows, will never start a war. We do not want a war. We do not now expect a war. This generation of Americans has already had enough, more than enough of war and hate and oppression. We shall be prepared if others wish it. We shall be alert to try to stop it. But we shall also do our part to build a world of peace where the weak are safe and the strong are just. We are not helpless before that task or hopeless of its success, confident and unafraid. We must labor on, not towards a strategy of annihilation, but towards a strategy of peace.


Hi, and welcome back to Esmerconk 2023. This is our second presentation session on searching and record management. As always, you can ask questions via Twitter by following at eshackathon or by using Slack if you've registered for the conference. Presenters will be answering those questions after the session as well. So our first speaker today is Trevor Riley with an introduction to site source, analyzing sources, methods, and search strategies over to you, Trevor. Hey there, welcome to this presentation on the new site source R package. My name is Trevor Riley, and in this presentation, I'm gonna provide an overview of site source's general functionality and the primary use cases for site source. So the package got its start at last year's hackathon. It's really fantastic to be able to share site source for the first time here at Esmerconk. I'd like to thank Neil Hadaway and the Esmerc planning committee for your support was critical in bringing this team together and getting the project off the ground. I also want to make a note that site source is in its final stages of development and testing. We're looking forward to launching version 1.0 here soon, which will include a fully functional shiny app as well. Before I jump into the package, I also want to take a moment to highlight the members of the site source development team, whose hard work and dedication made this possible. Along with myself, we had Kaitlin Hare, Lucas Walbrook, Matthew Granger, Sarah Young, Chris Prichard, and Neil Hadaway. Okay, so at its core site source has two unique functions. First, the package allows for users to add customizable metadata in three fields. We've named them site source, site string, and site label. And in this presentation, I'll refer to this process as tagging. Tagging citations is the first step users take after uploading citations. By tagging a citation record, users can maintain information on a number of variables, which could include the resource which the record was found, the method used to find it, an iteration or variation of a strategy, such as a search string or the progression of a search string, a research phase, and even certain groups of citations, such as benchmarking articles. The second ability relates to how site source deduplicates records. Instead of working like a traditional process where a user selects a single record to be retained, site source actually merges records to create a single primary record. This primary record maintains the tags provided by the user in the three fields. And it's with these two functions that we can start to produce some really great visualizations and analyze our citation data. If you watched any of the Esmar sessions from previous years or even this year, you might recognize the ASIS package developed by Caitlin Hare. Currently a modified version of ASIS is the backbone of the record merging process. All right, so let's take a look at the first example, analyzing resources and methodologies. We'll start by taking a look at the vignette on comparing topic coverage. In this example, we're using site source to review overlap between databases for literature on the harmful effects of gambling addiction. To do this, we've ran a search for the term gambling harm in the title and abstract fields in Lens, Scopus, Criminal Justice, Abstracts, Psychinfo, and Medline. After loading the package, we can tag our citation files with the source names. And once we've run through the deduplication process, we can start to create some plots of our data. This heat map shows the number of records retrieved from each database, as well as the count of overlapping records found between databases. In this example, we can see the scope is the highest number of records on gambling harm and Criminal Justice Abstracts, the least. We can also see out of the 176 articles found at PubMed, 171 of them were found at Scopus. This next heat map uses the same data but provides a breakdown of overlap percents between two sources. As you can see, 97% of PubMed's 176 articles were also found at Scopus. The next plot is the upset plot. The upset plot is one of my personal favorites and it's just another way of looking at that overlap but in a bit more detail. So you can see here, we have our five databases. You can see Scopus here at the bottom with the most number of citations followed by PubMed. And then you can take a look at how these databases overlapped and in what combination. You can see here that Scopus had the highest number of unique citations followed by Lens and Psychinfo. You can also see that there were only six articles that were found in every single database. All right, for this next example, let's say you want to understand not only how each database performed and look at the unique records each source contributed but you'd also like to know how that searching of traditional databases and platform performed versus two other literature gathering methods. Let's say citation chasing forward on your benchmarking articles and then using a new co-citation machine learning AI you fill in the blank discovery tool. So taking those two different methods. For this case, we can take a look at the source analysis across screening phases vignette. And instead of just using one of the customizable fields we're gonna use two this time. We use site source and site label. All right, so you are first going to install and load the package. You are going to point to the direction of where that data is that you want to evaluate and then you are going to start tagging. So you can see these of the file names and then aligns with the source name and then the label here we have a search because those were search results. You get down to this next one, this is final. So it does not have an actual source and it is labeled as a final because these were the final included studies. You can see that TIAB is the title and abstract. Those were the ones that made it past title and abstract. And above those, you can actually see that we have our two methods. Those are also labeled as search. So we're gonna go through the deduplication process and then we're gonna start taking a look at some of these plots. So again, we have that first map plot which shows overlap between the databases. We have the same one as a percent and then we have that upset plot. But I wanna get down to this next one which is again, one of my favorites. So this is where we actually start to see that site label come into play. At the bottom here, it might be a little difficult to see but this is broken up into three plots, bar plots as you can see and we have actually searched, screened and final. So not only are we looking at the databases across the top here, agriscab, you can only green file and then Web of Science here at the end and these two methods. Well, we're seeing how many unique records that method or source brought in and how many duplicate records. So we've found in at least one other resource or method there and you can see then how that progresses through title and abstract screening and for the final included papers. Just below that plot, we do have the citation summary table. We're still working on this. This is one of the things we wanna just make sure is polished and I think this is going to be a really fantastic addition to the package. It's something I'm really looking forward to seeing and thank you to Alison Patel for the inspiration on this and also for helping us in this regard. All right, one last quick example. This is actually a use case that I hadn't even considered at the beginning but made complete sense when I was working on another project. So I'd like to show this one off benchmark testing. So we had a number of different searches and we wanted to be able to take a look at how well we were finding our benchmarking articles and using site source, we were able to actually do multiple iterations of our search string so much faster. So in this case here, you can actually see that search string four and search string six. I know these are hard to see but they are not contributing to finding any of the benchmarking articles themselves. Unlike you can see search string number five has found three, search string two has done three just by themselves, right? But search string four and six while they are finding benchmarking articles, we also have other strings that are finding those same benchmarking articles. So again, a really interesting way to use site source in helping to develop your search strings and strategy. This was also just a whole lot of fun. I think we went through four or five different iterations of this and this is just one of them. I think this may be our second or third. And then also just heading down here and taking a look at this record level table. It's just fantastic. Lucas put this together and it still just blows my mind. I love it. It's very helpful in the benchmark testing. You can play around with it. You can also download it as a CSV. So if you're interested, come jump in this vignette and take a look. A couple more things before I wrap up, I just wanna point out that site source is available via download on GitHub. We will be working to get it up on Cran soon. And we've also put together some discussion boards. We're really hoping that folks engage with us here. We've got the different use cases outlined and vignettes. And then finally, if you're interested in working with us to further develop site source, if you have some interesting use cases in mind, please drop us a line. Please reach out to us on this discussion board. We're really looking forward to working with you. And that's all for now. Thank you so much and happy site sourcing. Thanks so much, Trevor. Up next, Constantinos Buñecas is going to introduce CCAR, a package for assessing primary study overlap across systematic reviews in overviews. Over to you, Constantinos. Hello and welcome to this presentation. My name is Constantinos Buñecas and I am a postdoctoral researcher at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Greece. Firstly, I would like to thank ESmart Conference for the chance to present our work. In this presentation, we are going to discuss about an art package called CCAR that provides easy-to-use function for assessing the degree of overlap of primary studies in an overview of reviews. So before I get started, I would like to introduce the other members of the team. Thodoros Diaconidis helped with coding on the packets and designed the sign-up. Ana Mavromanoli and Ana Metina Haydich helped to publish a relative paper with use cases and examples. The evidence-based medicine pyramid, the pyramid on the left side of this slide, consists of primary studies, observational and experimental, which are the sources of information for clinical evidence. Both systematic reviews, which are the first level of evidence synthesis and overview of reviews, which are the second level of evidence synthesis, can be considered as lenses through which evidence from primary studies is viewed. Therefore, the unit of synthesis for an overview of reviews is the review study. One of the key methodological challenges unique to overview of reviews is the management of overlapping data due to the inclusion of the same primary studies in the reviews. The researchers may need to explore the degree of overlap at the overview level and the outcome level. The correct covered area, CCA index, has been used as a quantitative measure of the extent of primary study overlap across the included reviews. In order to calculate the CCA index, we needed to create a matrix which is usually called citation matrix. All functions included in the CCAR packets use the CCA index. There are two versions of the formula, the original CCA index and the adjusted one. If the authors consider structural missingness when they create the citation matrix, the adjusted version is calculated automatically by the functions of the packets. Structural missingness refers to the missing data of the matrix for a logical reason. For example, primary studies were published after the contact of a specific systematic review. Therefore, it was not possible to be included in the review. This is a chronological structural missingness. As we can see in the CCA formula, the N is the sum of ones in the citation matrix are equals to the number of rows of the matrix corresponding to the unique primary studies in the reviews. C is the number of columns of the matrix corresponding to the number of reviews and the X in the adjusted formula is the sum of the X's in the matrix which denote the structural missingness. Additionally, visual methods, such as van and Euler diagrams, upset plots, hit maps, and node link graphs can be used for depicting potential overlap in overview of reviews. For the rest of the presentation, I'm going to focus on the CCAER packets which is available at github.com slash thdacon slash CCAER and it can be downloaded using the install underscore github function from the DevTools packets. First, the functions of the CCAER packets expect the data frame which is the citation matrix and may be a first view of the overlapping reviews. In this matrix, the first row should contain the names of the included reviews and the first column should contain the names of the unique primary studies included in the reviews. The data frame must contain ones and zeros as well as missing values in case of structural missingness. One should be used to indicate if the primary study has been cited, otherwise zero. Of course, any missing value in the citation matrix affects the results. The packets includes three main functions, the CCA function, the CCA underscore table function and the CCA underscore hit map function. The citation matrix, denoted as cm, is the first argument for each function. Additionally, all functions enable the incorporation of structural missingness in the matrix. The first function, CCAER, calculates the overall CCA index for the entire citation matrix as a proportion and the percentage. Larger values indicate greater overlap of primary studies across the reviews. The second function, CCA underscore table, creates a data frame with the per-wise CCA calculations from the citation matrix. The third function, CCA underscore hit map uses the ggplot2r packets generating an upper triangle hit map which shows the CCA calculations as a percentage for all possible pairs of reviews. The gray diagonal tiles in the graph present information about the number of CINDI primary studies as well as the total number primary studies included in each review. There are some advantages of the hit map plot produced by the CCAER packets. The plot is highly customizable as a ggplot object. It uses a sequential continuous color scale. It enables the incorporation of structural missingness in the citation matrix. It presents the single and total number of primary studies included in each review and it is a publication ready plot. Finally, a CINDI app is under development for those users who are unfamiliar with the command line environment. And here are some relative references. You can find more details about the packets in our recently published paper with the title, CCAER, a packets for assessing primary study overlap across systematic reviews in overviews. Thank you very much for your attention. Many thanks indeed, Konstantinos. Next, we have Leonie Twente, who will be introducing her talk entitled, Implementing Text Mining to Optimize Search Term Selection for Systematic Reviews in Language Education, a case study. Welcome to my contribution to the evidence synthesis and meta-analysis in our conference 2023. My name is Leonie Regina-Adventa and I'm a linguist. In this video, I present a case report of using text mining to support search term selection in the context of a systematic review project in the field of language education. I will first skip some background on our project and touch upon the particular challenges that arose during search term selection. Then I will elaborate on how we implemented text mining by using the Litsearcher package developed by Eliza Grains. Now we'll finish with a short discussion of our experience of using Litsearcher in systematic reviews in the educational sciences. The context of my presentation is a systematic review project carried out between 2018 and 2022. And the core team consisted of Marta Hürfler, Tatjana Vasilieva, Tizal Fil and me. But of course, over the years, a number of additional people contributed substantially and they are acknowledged here. To give you some context on the content of our review, it's been shown many times that language and content learning are interdependent. Since the 1990s, there has been a growing interest in an accelerated development of what's commonly called language-sensitive subject teaching approaches. These approaches are a deductive consequence of this knowledge. Since they explicitly integrate language learning objectives with content learning objectives aiming to promote all students' academic outcomes across the curriculum, wide range of approaches have been developed over the years and in very different school settings across the world. Despite this popularity, it's unclear whether they are really more effective compared to non-language-sensitive teaching approaches, primarily because individual study results are mixed and the diversity of approaches makes it hard to maintain an overview about the evidence available. Thus, we were motivated to do a systematic review, to collate, praise and synthesize the quantitative evidence available on the effectiveness of this very diverse set of classroom interventions that fall under our definition of this umbrella term. We followed a systematic review method, workflow adhering to guidelines, including publishing the protocol and the use of the PICAS framework. Of course, the goal of our search strategy was to retrieve all relevant studies, achieving high recall, while achieving as little relevant studies as possible, achieving high precision. However, designing the search strategy was one of the major challenges in our project. In the highly interdisciplinary field of the education sciences, there's no standardized ontology and terminology is rather fuzzy, particularly from our own experience as well as the scoping work we had done on language sensitive subject teaching approaches. We knew that both for German and English, a wide variety of terms exists in the literature used to index such an electronic databases as well. Thus, taking the example of the intervention category of PICAS, many different labels may denote the interventions studied in the research we are interested in finding. In addition, we are aware that we were likely biased towards the part of the literature using a specific set of those terms. Risking selection bias, if we solely relied on our knowledge of the use of terminology in our searches. Thus, the conditions required us to use a method would help counteract biases and optimize the selection of search terms that best represented the literature we wanted to find. We needed to make sure to identify all synonyms in order to avoid not retrieving potential relevant papers, which may not make reference to the terms we identified all the while limiting the amount of the retrieved literature. Now quest to optimize search transaction we found that a lot of the grains have been working on an implementation of an approach optimizing search transaction for systematic reviews in ecology and evolution. And she implemented her solution in the R language publishing a package called literature and this approach reduces biases because it does not rely solely on the researchers grasp of the literature in search term selection. Basically it uses keyword co-occurrence networks to identify search terms that are most relevant or most indicative of the set of articles that uses as a database. For our project we decided to use a multi-step procedure using literature as a complement to the other steps of search term selection. We started by collaborating with experts to define initial search terms and they were used to conduct main searches in a set of databases using a set of articles as input to the literature workflow resulting in an output compliment in the search terms identified in step one and step three we used other relevant papers to extract further keywords resulting in a final database of search terms manually combined into search strategies accustomed for each database that we searched. To go into detail for the second step our implementation of literature you can see that our main searches yielded 2,668 documents for our English databases Scopus and Eric and 58 documents for our German database FIS-Buildung. On the right hand side you can see some terms that were used in order to construct the naive searches. So these documents were imported into literature using the import function. In fact we had to find a workaround for the FIS-Buildung exports because the database export was not compatible with literature. We included both texts from title and abstract as well as the tagged keywords in our network creation. We played around with the various options in literature working curiously to find a suitable cut-off for English and German respectively. This method resulted in 630 English keywords and 53 German raked keywords as well as 38 of the tagged keywords. Here within the German corpus the raking method didn't work as well and so the tagged keywords were much more useful and we looked at them separately. The exported keywords were inspected manually and we selected a subset of them to contribute to our database of keywords replacing less specific keywords identified by the experts in round one or simply adding to the keyword selection. Okay, so what kinds of search terms did we actually identify at each step? I selected here some that are indicative of the kinds of search terms selected for the Python intervention category at each step. So at the first step you can see that we found mainly terminology describing particular interventions such as scaffolding, SIAP, terms of language and reciprocal teaching. Literature then added some more general n-grams such as academic language instruction, language learning while teaching content which seemed to be very representative of the literature we're looking for. The third step also included many more of those n-grams. So what's the takeaway? We found that using text mining in a more general search term selection process helped identify important search terms and reduced risk of bias in searches for systematic reviews in the education sciences. For example, we extended expert define simple search terms through automatically identified n-grams which is known to improve precision. In the test we conducted with the ERIC database we found that indeed for a set of 14 gold standard studies of optimized search strategy, including the identified search terms from literature had better precision and recall compared to a search using only controlled vocabulary. The problems we encountered were twofold. So one, we had a language problem, literature did not work so well for German as it did for English. And one may need adaptation for importing from databases not included in the literature package. So these are discipline specific databases that may differ substantially, but there are workarounds for this. For example, using base or functions to adapt the database structure to the searcher's needs. In some solutions to problems in systematic every methods may indeed hold across disciplines but require some adjustments depending on terminology, infrastructure, et cetera. Thank you for listening and please share your experiences with using technology such as literature in your systematic review projects. Thanks so much, Leonie. Up next, Jakub Ruskovski is going to be introducing the key role of citation chasing in the evidence synthesis on the gastrointestinal symptoms, prevalence in chronic kidney disease, a case study. Hello, my name is Jakub Ruskovski. Today I would like to present our findings on the key role of citation chasing, indeed evidence synthesis on the gastrointestinal symptoms, prevalence in chronic kidney disease. Additionally, especially for all of you who are learning R, I will show a code to perform a basic meta-analysis of prevalence data. Four background, four introductory facts about chronic kidney disease. The chronic kidney disease or CKD is an umbrella term for any abnormalities of kidney structure or function that have implications for health and are present for at least three months. According to the estimated iteration function, CKD is divided into five stages, from G1 to G5. The last one means kidney failure. CKD is a growing health concern affecting millions of people worldwide. Contrary to its name, chronic kidney disease appears to be a systemic disease. It results from the disruption of a number of physiological processes as kidney function declines. Therefore, CKD patients suffer from such conditions as anemia, cardiovascular disease or even bone disorder. As a consequence, CKD patients experience a wide range of symptoms, including gastrointestinal valve. But how much they are overlooked? As always, the answer should be found in a systematic review. The greatest and most up-to-date systematic review from April, 2022 was based on a search of pre-databases and not very specified citation chasing. They provided meta-analyses on the prevalence of constipation, diarrhea and bloating, but practicing picking the utility of such data was limited because on stages of CKD were merged and analyzed together. A half year later, we published a systematic review, fully dedicated to lower GI symptoms and find a lot more data that enable us to take into account the stages of CKD. In this table, I compared findings from the previous systematic review and our work on the right. In the case of abdominal pain, we provided data that were completely missed in the previous systematic review. In the other cases, we analyzed data for thousands of patients more as in the case of bloating. What I love the most is dividing general outcomes into more specific ones such as constipation into the low frequency of bowel movements, heart-stool consistency or self-reported symptom. It is important because each of them can have other causes and also other health implications. So you can see we were able to collect enough data to provide an estimated prevalence for many specific outcomes. In the case of constipation, we included half more patients than the previous systematic reviews. Okay, so how did we succeed and how did we get additional data that had been overlooked in the previous systematic review? The answer lies in data sources. Besides very broad database search and a conventional citation chasing of included studies, we performed citation chasing of papers that introduced questionnaires that are used to assess symptoms in patients. Taken together, forward citation chasing of these articles added data for more than 2,000 patients, nearly 20% of all included studies in our analysis. How did we carry out this? Firstly, we listed questionnaires that ask about symptoms that we were interested in. Secondly, we found articles that introduced these questionnaires and listed their DOIs. Finally, we used the DOIs to search for studies that use these questionnaires in the CKD populations in practice. Just copy and paste the list of DOIs on citation chaser page, click on the load button, and then go to the citation tab. The next step is to search for all citing articles, wait a while and download the file. This file can be important for abstract screen into let's say Ryan, one of the free application for abstract and title screen. Currently, it is recommended to meta-analyze single proportions data such as prevalence using GLMM. It is easy to conduct such analysis with the meta package. It fits the random intercept logistic progression model for all learning are here I show the code that I use to meta-analyze data and to plot data. Although publication bias by its nature is mainly concerned with studies on the effectiveness of interventions, we have, of course, also done such analyzes. Firstly, I plotted a classic panel plot and checked the significance of the asymmetry of the peter's test, p-value was high. However, this paper from 2018 introduced new methods to look for reporting biases. TOI plots, as you can see, and LFK index. They are frequently used in meta-analyses of prevalence data. In this case, LFK index was ever one, so we found a minor positive reporting bias. It means that studies that reported higher prevalence of self-reported constipation were more probable to be published. We use the alt meta package to perform sensitivity analysis with the first function. We tested whether the choice of a link function significantly affects the estimated prevalence of symptoms. And the next function was used because the two-step method to meta-analyze prevalence data is still popular and there is a lot of controversy around the Freeman 2K transformation. That is mostly used to normalize the proportion distribution before pulling. We concluded, as you can see in this table, that the results are generally stable. GLMM with Coaching Link tends to provide a bit lower estimates while the two-step method has a bit higher values. If you are interested in such analysis, I strongly recommend the paper published in 2022 by Leif and Glin, the author of the alt meta package. Finally, I would like to point out the main limitation we faced with. I hope that somebody from the participants of the conference will be interested in working on any of the challenging issues. Firstly, there is a lack of validated filter that can be used in search strategy for studies assessing the prevalence of disease or symptoms. I believe that it is also possible to automate both equation and optimization of search strategy. Secondly, there are no well-established one-step methods to meta-analyze multi-nomial, ordinal data, such as symptoms, severity, or still consistency types. Since I'm not a programmer, I would love to see examples of code with the implementation of such models. Finally, it was really hard for me to find information on how to modify fonts in the charts plotted with the meta package. Eventually, I had to change them with Corel. Moreover, I did not find a well-established method to plot multi-nomial data. Perhaps there are data artists with nice solutions to enhance standard forest plots. And take home as such, citation chasing should not be limited to studies identified through database searches. If you conduct a meta-analysis of prevalence of symptom, perform citation chasing of the questioners that use, that are used to assess the symptom, the prevalence of symptoms can be meta-analyzed very easily with the meta package and there is a need for more research and more working examples in the area of the meta-analysis of multi-nomial and ordinal data. Thank you for your attention. Many thanks indeed, Jakob. Next today, Mark Lajanes will be introducing a study-centric reference manager for research synthesis in R. Hi, my name is Mark Lajanes and I'm an ecologist at the University of South Florida and I'm gonna take a little bit of your time today to talk about this reference managing R package that I tried to crack a few years ago. There's really three things I wanna discuss. The first is what's out there in terms of conventional reference managing tools. Two, talk about how these things don't quite fit for our research synthesis needs. And then finally three, I'll try to wrap up with a few aspirational goals on these tools. Now I'm very much preaching to the choir here but if you've ever taken on a research synthesis project like a systematic review or meta-analysis, I feel like you see yourself as a virtuoso already with bibliographic information.  Now in terms of what tools are available out there, there are a lot of neat things in terms of research synthesis that we could use. But if you're approaching a research synthesis project for the first time, you may not know what these tools are and you might try to shoehorn a lot of these bibliographic reference managing tools that already exist into your research synthesis project. I remember years ago, right? Men in LA was the hot stuff, the hot kid on the block and it being an absolute headache to try to shoehorn into a research synthesis. Yes, you can annotate, yes you could code but really the UI, the interface is not designed to facilitate that process whatsoever. Zodero is kind of emerging as a fantastic tool for organizing and managing all these references and you could also kind of shoehorn it for many stages involved in the research synthesis project. But my concern with these tools is it actually makes it difficult for us to navigate quickly what we want and it makes it difficult for us to read and understand the citations that we have to continuously evaluate to be included in our research synthesis projects. So here's what a typical bibliographic reference managing software does, right? It allows you to import the searches from databases. It allows you to search all these references, organize them in a nice way. It allows you to export the citations if you're writing a manuscript. It allows you to link up PDFs or the website associated with the study so you could trace back to that original study so you have access to more than just the citation and the metadata of the study but you have the actual copy of the publication. Newer versions of these tools allow you to actually annotate the PDF itself which is eye-opening in terms of keeping track of many decisions that we do or coding criteria that we have to apply for our synthesis projects but for most users that are using this bibliographic software, the goal is to really organize citations and allow for the formatting of these citations to get plugged into a manuscript. The interface of these things are very much managerial, organizational, right? They're tools and meant to sort, organize the bibliographic stuff but between you and me and anyone who's taken a research synthesis project, our relationship with each individual reference is way more intimate than the casual researcher pulling together references for a manuscript. We need to have clear and clean access to each of the references to make them readable, to understand whether or not they need to be included in our projects and to trace to have a tracking system involved in where they kind of fall out in that entire pipeline. Maybe a study does not get included in the final product, in the final report but at what stage did it get dropped? Having an interface that allows you to cleanly navigate that whole process, I think would greatly facilitate our goals and needs into developing clean reports that are readable and transparent all the way through the entire research synthesis pipeline. So years ago, I tried to crack this in R and R is not the cleanest approach to do this kind of stuff. Clearly, if you were taking this seriously, you do it all in JavaScript, I suppose. Shiny is fantastic for this, but again, I feel like you could just skip that whole part and jump into JavaScript to organize the references. My approach was using Tickle2K just because it provides a quickly generated front end for R. And so I'm gonna continue using that GUI package to develop these tools further. The challenge, of course, is that things are kind of not nice looking. You're dealing with a tool that was developed in the late 80s and 90s and there hasn't been much progression in terms of like a beauty and design. But things are emerging that allow us to kind of make things look nice now. So I feel like now is the time to kind of push these things further. But when I first took a crack at it, things were still kind of ugly, but I feel like there's some neat aspects associated with the reference managing tool that sets it apart from these conventional Mandalay Zodero type approaches to managing references. One is rather than just having a tabulated relationship with all these citations, every paper is openly and easily readable with all the toggling and coding criteria associated with it. So the PDFs, the coding decisions, whether at what point in the research synthesis pipeline was it excluded or included, and also links to the endpoints of the synthesis, whether they're effect sizes or just their relationship in terms of where they get aggregated with other studies is all included wrapped up in how we're used to dealing with references, which is essentially just like a bibliographic list at the end of a publication. So the whole UI is designed to make it look like a collection of references from the end of a publication. So what you get is a readable citation and what gets tagged on the citation are all the coding criteria that were used to label the study. And of course you get quick access to the metadata and other effect size data that are associated with the study. Finally, also what's labeled with each individual study is where they belong in that entire research synthesis pipeline and whether or not you can trace back to its origin and any changes and modifications that occurred when we were trying to push it through to create a report. So aspirationally, I wanna put more work into this reference managing tool, but my views on what's something that is that would facilitate a research synthesis project are often bizarre because I get more involved in trying to develop tools rather than trying to complete a project as a whole. So when I tried to record a giant YouTube course of me doing a research synthesis project from A to Z and posted on YouTube, I needed a tool that allowed the viewers to see exactly what I was up to. And so that was my motivation to create this visual UI for research synthesis to organize bibliographic information. I think it's time for me to kind of push it further and release it. And so what I wanna do is just open discussion on like what would be the interesting things that I could include a little bit more than just this list of coding criteria and references. I do not wanna replace Zotero. I do not wanna replace Mendeley. I just wanna create this clean readable interface that allows us to look at each citation and reference and visualize it quickly at what stage it belonged to in the research synthesis pipeline. And hopefully by creating a highly visual tool that maybe is very intuitive, it's easier to achieve our research synthesis goals. So again, I'm at the University of South Florida and I really appreciate your time. And thanks so much, Mark. That concludes our second presentation session. I hope that you enjoyed it. We've had some amazing talks there. I'm really looking forward to seeing you back again at our next session. So enjoy your day for the time being. If you do have any questions for our presenters, do please keep them coming in by Twitter. If you can tag the presenter or tag us, we'll do our best to make sure that those questions get answered. After the event as well. Thanks very much and see you soon.