21st Century Tools for Researchers and Practitioners Using Automated Tools for Knowledge Curation

This report is part of a series Abt Global produced for Casey Family Programs. Abt has provided a roadmap for a child and family well-being system focused on children from prenatal to age 3. It describes how automation-enhanced literature searches can begin to solve the problem of examining and exploring vast amounts of information within a topical domain and filtering it quickly to narrow and identify the topic areas of interest.

Background: In FY2020, child protection agencies received 3.9 million referrals for child maltreatment involving 7.1 million children—more than 19,000 children every day. We know the child welfare system is steeped in inequities linked to race and poverty that play a role in removing children from their homes.

Promoting child and family well-being starts with developing a knowledge and evidence base to explore what is known about what has worked and what hasn’t. The volume of information, however, in modern literature reviews can be a barrier—in human resources and subjectivity—to designing and implementing, novel data-driven interventions.

Through iteration with subject matter experts, tools like these can help accelerate and expand the search for published and unpublished works and identify key themes and emerging trends in the literature. These tools accelerate our ability to get highly-targeted knowledge into the hands of the stakeholders to efficiently improve outcomes of interest.