Research Guides: Systematic reviews, scoping reviews and other evidence syntheses: Screening results

Screening search results

Once you have completed every component of your literature search and exported all of your search results, you will need to screen the entire pool of studies based on your pre-defined inclusion and exclusion criteria.

Steps in screening

1. Record the total number of studies retrieved from all sources - databases, grey literature, hand searching, etc.

2. Record the number of duplicate studies retrieved from all sources and then remove the duplicate citations from your pool of results

3. Title and abstract screening:

each reviewer scans the title and abstract for every study, applying the inclusion and exclusion criteria to determine relevance
If there is disagreement between two reviewers, a third reviewer must be used to cast a final vote on including or excluding the study
- record the number of studies excluded by this step in screening

4. Full-text screening:

each reviewer reads the full text of the articles remaining after the first stage in screening, again applying the inclusion and exclusion criteria
- record the number of studies excluded by this step of full text screening
- this pool of articles will become the dataset for the review

Recording screening results

These resources from PRISMA will help ensure you record the flow of citations throughout the retrieval and screening process:

Software for screening

Covidence This link opens in a new window
- This web-based software platform streamlines systematic reviews and other research reviews that require screening citations – title and abstract and/or full text -- assessing risk of bias, or and extracting study characteristics and outcomes.
- Users must create an account to utilize Brock's access to this tool.
- Find help and answers to FAQs in Covidence's online knowledge base.

Covidence knowledge base
Covidence Academy - free tools and tips for using Covidence and conducting systematic reviews

Rayyan

free web-based tool for screening results for evidence synthesis reviews
for more information, see this guide from McGill University Library

Cadima

CADIMA is a free web tool facilitating the conduct and assuring for the documentation of systematic reviews, systematic maps and further literature reviews.

Obtaining articles

You may need to request a large volume of articles which are not available directly from the Brock Library
These may be requested through the interlibrary loan (ILL) service
Due to the impact of high volumes of ILL requests on staff capacity, researchers are asked to contact libill@brocku.ca before submitting these requests
Be aware that the fulfillment process is often complex and may require several weeks at our end