LB 26-224 - Conducting an expansive literature review for the development of a novel, open-source database (STOICH)

The Stoichiometric Traits of Organisms in Their Chemical Habitat (STOICH) Project is an interdisciplinary, multi-institutional collaboration led by members of the Ecological Stoichiometry Cooperative. The primary objective of the STOICH Project is to synthesize an open-source database on the ecological stoichiometry of inland aquatic ecosystems. This dataset will allow researchers to explore broader, more complex spatio-temporal stoichiometric trends across a wide-range of disciplines in ecology. All data within the STOICH database will be 1.) from an inland aquatic system 2.) whole-body and organismal in nature 3.) taken from the field and 4.) stoichiometric with respect to carbon, nitrogen, and/or phosphorus. Members of the project are generating novel data that fit these criteria, but a considerable portion of the database will be populated with preexisting data identified through an expansive literature review. This large-scale review began in May 2021 and extended through October 2022. We first performed a systematic boolean search in Web of Science in order to locate potential data sources. A secondary search was performed one year into the review to locate any newly published sources. In total, our searches identified 23,410 publications to be surveyed for relevant stoichiometric data. Following these searches, each publication title was exported and given a unique internal identification number. Potential data sources were methodically scanned and sorted using a flowchart-like approach designed around STOICH’s data entry criteria. Information about each publication was input into a google form, along with its unique identification number, allowing us to quickly consolidate papers with usable data. As of April 2023, over 99% of these sources have successfully moved past the initial review stage and 1,940 publications were deemed to contain pertinent data. In conclusion, the protocols and methods developed during this literature review allowed us to survey a substantial number of papers for the development of the STOICH database. We suggest that those undertaking large-scale literature reviews in the future use a similar unique identification and google form framework.