Rayyan for Systematic Reviews

Including/Excluding Articles

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:

Select an article and then use one of these keyboard shortcuts to decide on it. The video below shows an example where the review includes the first article (by selecting it and pressing I on the keyboard) and excludes the second article (by selecting it and pressing E on the keyboard). For articles that you are excluding, you can add exclusion reasons using the Exclude with Reasons box.

If you cannot decide whether an article should be included or excluded based on the title and abstract, you can mark it as Maybe (by selecting it and pressing M on the keyboard), similar to the third article in the video below. You can also add a Label or Note to any uploaded articles. Labels are short and filterable, while notes are usually longer and non-filterable. This can distinguish between articles that have not been screened and undecided and those that need more clarification.   

More on Screening References/Articles in Rayyan

Article Screening in Rayyan | Inclusion - Exclusion Decisions | Auto-scrolling in New Interface from Rayyan on YouTube

Resolving Conflicts

Once screening has been completed, it is time for the review members to make final decisions about the articles they currently disagree with. This practice is known as resolving conflicts and is usually performed by discussion between reviewers or by requesting a tie-breaking decision from a reviewer not previously involved in screening articles.

Switching off blinding

During the screening process, blinding is on. This means a reviewer can only view their own decisions and not view the decisions made by other reviewers. Before the conflict resolution process can start, blinding must be switched off, which can only be done by the review owner (the person who created the review in Rayyan).

Resolution of conflicts

Once blinding has been switched off, reviewers can see articles on which there is currently disagreement by selecting Conflict under the "Filter by inclusion" facet. After agreement is reached on each article, the relevant reviewer can simply change their opinion.

More on How to Resolve Conflicts in Rayyan

Labels

Rayyan does not offer PDF annotation capability. You must rely on the labeling system to provide annotations for your decisions or use labels to categorize the citations during screening for further analysis, export, etc.

More on How to Add and Remove Labels/Reasons