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. 2025 Oct 21;15(10):e101567. doi: 10.1136/bmjopen-2025-101567

Table 2. Variables to be extracted from each article and/or website.

Bibliography
  • Author details

  • Journal

  • DOI or URL

  • Year of publication

Study characteristics
  • Title

  • Main objective

  • Type (eg, a research paper, website, conference proceedings)

  • Study design (eg, cross-sectional, longitudinal)

  • Main objective

Study area
  • Geographical location of study (country(ies), world region(s))

  • Urbanicity (whether, urban, rural or both)

  • Population for which access metric was computed (eg, children)

  • Unit of analysis such as district, census tract

Big data characteristics (multiple per study or website possible)
  • Name of the big data provider, for example Google

  • Big data source for example crowdsourced, GPS probes, satellite imagery

  • Big data warehousers (if any)

  • Data elements (eg, speeds, travel time, GPS locations, geolocated tweets, and other quantitative characteristics that can be used to compute accessibility)

  • Data type: for example, tables, JSON, XML, text, images, video

  • Geographical coverage

  • Resolution (temporal and spatial)

  • Date and location of collection

  • Update frequency (eg, real time, static or delayed)

  • Method of access (eg, downloading, API, web service, etc)

  • Methods of collection (eg, smartphones or crowd sourcing, remote sensing)

  • Cost (if applicable) of the data

  • Licensing/terms of use: restrictions on commercial or derivative use

  • Quality indicators (eg, % missing data)

  • Last update

Big data services (multiple per study or website possible)
  • Service name

  • Provider/owner: organisation or company offering the service.

  • Domain/scope: the area of data it covers (eg, geospatial, social media).

  • Documentation availability

  • Authentication/authorisation (API keys, OAuth, open access.)

  • Rate limits (requests per second/day, throttling policies)

  • Data access models (from free/open-access to freemium to paid/subscription)

  • Cost if applicable (in case of paid/subscription models)

  • Latency: average response time

  • Language support (such as Python, R, Java, etc.)

Methods (if applicable)
multiple possible
  • Transportation mode considered such as walking

  • Service to which access was computed, for example, education, healthcare

  • Accessibility metrics derived such as travel time, distance

  • Methods or approaches used to compute the accessibility metric with the big data retrieved

  • Software, tools or programmes used to process the retrieved big data to get accessibility metric

Final summary (if applicable)
free text form
  • Limitations mentioned in the paper/website linked to the big data or big data services

  • Recommendations to address the limitations by the authors

API, application programme interface; GPS, Global Positioning System.