Once inclusion and exclusion criteria have been agreed, it is time to start screening your articles.
Rayyan offers simple keyboard shortcuts to speed up this process:
| Shortcut | Result |
|---|---|
| I | to include the article |
| E | to exclude the article |
| U | to remove a previous decision on an article and return it to undecided |
To decide on a particular article, select it and then use one of these keyboard shortcuts. In the video below, we see an example where the review includes the first article (by selecting it and pressing I on their keyboard), excluding the second and third articles (by selecting them and pressing E on their keyboard), and then reversing this decision for the second article (by selecting it and pressing U on their keyboard) and returning it to undecided.
If you cannot decide if an article should be included or excluded based on the title and abstract, use the labeling system by adding the label Maybe to that article. This way, you will be able to distinguish between those articles that have not been screened, undecided and the ones that need more clarification.
Once screening has been completed, it is time for the reviewers to make final decisions about the articles they currently disagree with. This practice is known as resolving conflicts and is usually performed either by discussion between reviewers or by requesting a tie-breaking decision from a reviewer not previously involved in screening articles.
During the screening process, blinding is on. This means a reviewer can only view their own decisions and cannot view the decisions made by other reviewers. Before the process of resolving conflicts can be started, blinding needs to be switched off, which can only be done by the review owner (the person who originally created the review in Rayyan).
Once blinding has been switched off, reviewers are able to see those articles where there is currently disagreement by selecting Conflicts in the left-hand bar. As agreement is reached on each article, it is then a simple matter for the relevant reviewer to change their opinion.
Rayyan does not offer PDF annotation capability. You must rely on the labeling system to either provide annotations for your decisions or use labels to categories the citations during screening for further analysis, export, etc.
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