I am doing a systematic review and meta-analysis on immunotherapy. Some non-English articles (articles in Chinese, french and Spanish) are included in my search results.
As I am not familiar with these languages, I faced a problem with extraction of data from these articles.
Does anybody have any advise on how to extract data from these articles?
Is there any free translation services for these languages?
Unfortunately, online translators like Google translate does not provide an accurate result considering these articles include medical terms.
I agree with Martín
Usually the following ways exist for getting the info out of non-English papers:
1. Using Google Translate: this is the most usual way used by many systematic reviewers and most of the times it works properly;
2. Contacting the authors of the paper for assistance;
3. Finding the papers cited the non-English paper because they probably have already done the translation and have the data in the paper;
4. Contacting the authors who have cited the non-English paper for assistance;
5. Finding volunteer/fee-based people to do the translation;
6. Cochrane Task Exchange is the best platform to ask the volunteers to check non-English papers even if your review is not a Cochrane review.
Hi,
Interesting work. Couldn't you ask the journals for English Manuscripts?
If that doesnt work, how about getting a collaborator in China who can help you with data extraction from Chinese publications?
Yes. It is a very common barrier when conducting a systematic review. You can ask to Cochrane Collab, as Martin suggested. In some cases, I wrote to the authors about data reports and they have replied to me into a couple of weeks, I think you can try with that.
Sincerely
Jose M
I did it few times with Google translate. If you translate one small chunk at a time than Google works much better. It just takes ½-1 hour or so. I didn't have much trouble with Google. I think, I wouldn't invite a collaborator to translate a paper. "International student" sounds very good advice.
- Badges
- Science method
- Similar topics
- Mathematics
- Statistics
- Statistical Techniques
- Meta-Analysis