Screening Process
Screening Best Practices
- Two independent reviewers for each screening step
- Third reviewer to mediate any conflicts
- Utilize inclusion/exclusion for screening decisions
- Ensure common understanding of how to apply inclusion/exclusion criteria. This is best done by having each reviewer review a set number of abstracts and then discussing the decisions as a group
- Not all abstracts will have sufficient information to make a decision. It is better to include and then exclude them at the full-text stage then miss out on potential studies
- Be over-inclusive at the Abstract Screening stage. Full-text screening will be more stringent
Systematic Review Software
Some teams choose to use the same software or tool for screening, selection, and data extraction. Other teams choose to use one software or tool for screening and selection and another tool for data extraction.
Covidence is a popular resource that frequently gets used to deduplicate citations; conduct title/abstract and full text screening; create Risk of Bias tables; perform data extraction; create PRISMA flow charts; and export to RevMan, and/or citation management software.
USC Libraries Supported Software
Getting Started With Covidence
- Demo Review - Explore and get familiar with Covidence
- How to Import References
- How to Undo an Import
- How to Bulk Import PDFs
Freely Available Software
- WebPlotDigitizer - AI assisted software that helps extract data from images/charts
Paid Software