Rayyan

Once inclusion and exclusion criteria have been agreed upon, it is time to start screening your articles.  

Rayyan offers simple keyboard shortcuts to speed up this process. Shortcuts for assigning decisions to records are explained below. For the full list of keyboard shortcuts, click the link below:

To make a decision on a particular article, select it with the mouse or use the up and down arrows on your keyboard to move through the list of citations, and then use one of these keyboard shortcuts. 

Researchers can also screen articles with the Rayyan mobile app, which is available on the iOS and Android platforms. You can screen in the app even without internet access. Once you are online, reopen the app to sync your decisions to the Rayyan server.

Once screening has been completed, it is time for the reviewers to make final decisions for those articles where they currently disagree. 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 who has not previously been involved in screening articles.

Switching off blinding

During the screening process, blinding is on.  This means each 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 by the review owner. To turn blinding on or off:

1. Go to the review dashboard
2. Click on the review title to open the screening summary
3. If blinding is on, there will be a green "Blind ON" button at the top of the screening summary. If blinding is currently off, there will be a red "Blind OFF" button. Click these colored buttons to change the review's blinding status.

Resolution of conflicts

Once blinding has been switched off, reviewers are able to see those articles where there is currently disagreement by selecting "Conflicts" in the Inclusion Decisions box in the left column. Once an agreement is reached on a record, all reviewers should change their decisions in Rayyan to match the team's final decision.

As you screen, you may find it useful to assign reasons and labels, using the corresponding menus in the full record view. Utilizing reasons and labels will help your team when resolving conflicts, extracting data, and reporting your process in adherence with PRISMA or other systematic review reporting guidelines.

Reasons

Reasons indicate why a record was excluded. Rayyan includes a default set of reasons, and your team can add custom reasons (instructions here).

Assigning a reason to a record automatically marks it as excluded:

1. Select a record
2. Click on the reason menu or hit the R key
3. Select the primary reason for exclusion using your mouse, or use the up/down arrows on your keyboard to highlight the desired reason, then hit the Enter/Return key

Visibility of reasons: Any reasons created by one collaborator will be available to all collaborators. However, you will not be able to view to which records these reasons have been assigned by other team members until the review is unblinded.

Labels

Use labels to annotate records or categorize citations while screening. For example, if you are performing a systematic review comparing three interventions, you might wish to assign labels that indicate which intervention(s) each record addresses. During data extraction and analysis, this will help you to readily identify which records have the necessary data.

Visibility of labels: Labels created by a collaborator are available only to that team member. However, once the review has been unblinded, you will be able to see all labels assigned to a record by any team member.