Keeping negation intact when passing on research reading notes

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A short article uses a Python example to show how to check whether a quoted phrase appears in a source excerpt, without treating a literal match as proof of scientific meaning. It draws on the PRISMA 2020 reporting guideline, published in BMJ in 2021, and stresses that the guideline is not meant to assess review conduct or methodological quality. The author argues that negative qualifiers must be preserved, since removing them can flip a source's meaning. The demo script reports a match offset for the retained phrase and no match for an altered one, while marking interpretation as requiring researcher review. The piece recommends keeping source URLs, versions, section headings and context in any handoff table, and noting unreported details as unknown rather than absent.

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