The Core Squad

Academic Research / EdTech SaaS · 2023

COSTAQDA

Cutting literature review and qualitative coding time for academic researchers with an AI-assisted analysis suite

Industry
Academic Research / EdTech SaaS
Timeline
6 months
Squad
6 specialists

Impact & results

30
PDFs processed per review batch

At a glance

“An AI-assisted suite that takes researchers from raw documents to a publication-ready literature review or coded transcript analysis.”

The challenge

Researchers spend more time processing documents than analyzing them.

Manually appraising study quality, coding transcripts, and assembling a literature review from dozens of source documents is slow, repetitive work that eats into the time researchers should spend on actual analysis and interpretation.

  • Manual CASP-style quality appraisal across many source documents
  • Transcript coding (meaning units, open/axial coding, theming) done by hand
  • Assembling a publication-ready literature review from scratch

Platform intelligence

“We built a platform that parses uploaded research documents and transcripts with the OpenAI API, automates quality appraisal and coding, and produces a structured evidence synthesis or literature review ready for export.”

What we built

Everything inside this engagement.

01

Qualitative Evidence Synthesis

  • Upload research PDFs for automated CASP quality appraisal
  • AI-assisted inductive coding and meta-ethnographic synthesis
02

Review Writer

  • Upload up to 30 PDFs at once
  • Automated evidence synthesis matrix
  • Publication-ready literature review exported to Word/PDF
03

Transcript Analyzer

  • Upload interview/focus group transcripts
  • Automated meaning units, open/axial coding, and theme generation
04

AI Document Parsing

  • OpenAI API-powered parsing of uploaded research documents
  • Feeds structured content into the coding and synthesis pipeline

Gallery

Inside the product.

COSTAQDA: Dashboard
COSTAQDA: Dashboard

Build & infrastructure

The stack behind it.

OpenAI APINode.jsPostgreSQL

Our approach

We built a document-parsing engine on the OpenAI API that ingests research PDFs and transcripts, then layered automated CASP-style quality appraisal, inductive coding, and meta-ethnographic synthesis on top, exporting straight to a publication-ready format.

The result

Researchers can now run a batch of up to 30 source PDFs through automated evidence synthesis, or a full transcript through automated coding and theming, instead of doing it by hand.