European Commission | Toxic effects of nanomaterials for health applications: how automation can support a systematic review of the literature?

ABSTRACT - Systematic reviews of the scientific literature can be an important source of information supporting the daily work of the regulators in their decision making, particularly in areas of innovative technologies where the regulatory experience is still limited. Significant research activities in the field of nanotechnology resulted in a huge number of publications in the last decades.

However, even if the published data can provide relevant information, scientific articles are often of divers quality and it is nearly impossible to manually process and evaluate such amount of data in a systematic manner.In this feasibility study we investigated to what extend open access automation tools can support a systematic review of toxicity effects of nanomaterials for health applications reported in the scientific literature.