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This documentation section describes how the evidence collections included in MetaCIH are prepared.

Before being released, all data is converted into a consistent, standardized format. This format ensures that data is compatible with other components of the MetaCIH infrastructure.

All released evidence collections live in their own online Github repository. These repositories are hosted by the metacih-project organization account. All repository names start with data-, followed by the shorthand of the evidence collections (e.g. data-depression-psyctr).

All MetaCIH evidence collections hosted on Github follow the same folder structure. In particular, a metadata folder is included in each repository. This folder contains additional information associated with the dataset (e.g. the search date, the number of studies, or a variable description).

After a new version of an evidence collection has been uploaded to Github, data validators are used to check if the format conforms to the standard required by other components of the MetaCIH infrastructure (e.g. metapsyTools).

Finalized repositories of an evidence collection are then officially released via the Github Zenodo integration.