Before you can access any feature or tabs in a Sysrev project, you must add some documents. There are several ways and formats you can use to add documents to your project. We will cover these different methods in depth in the following boxes.
You can also import records from another Sysrev project using the 'child project' approach covered in the Starting a new project tab.
Perhaps the most common method for getting started with a Sysrev project is importing records from external databases. This approach would be used in most types of evidence synthesis projects such as systematic reviews, scoping reviews and rapid reviews. All of these methods expect robust, well-documented and reproducible searches across a range of scholarly databases and other sources.
The CMU Libraries' has many academic databases and our subject librarians can help you identify the key databases for your research topic.
In the video below, we'll walk you through a typical workflow for getting set up for a systematic literature review using Sysrev including developing, documenting, running, and deduplicating searches and then uploading records into your Sysrev project.
[video coming soon]
You can upload PDFs directly, either individually or as a zip file of many PDFs, by going to Manage -> Add Documents and dragging and dropping your PDF(s) or zip files to the center window. Then click Upload File.
However, we urge caution with this approach since the PDF metadata (i.e., title, abstract, etc.) will not be automatically extracted from the files. Instead, when you click on the record, the only metadata will be the PDF filename. Rather than adding PDFs directly, consider attaching PDFs individually or in bulk to the metadata records imported via an RIS or other file, as described in other sections on this page.
Sysrev allows users to attach PDFs to existing records in their Sysrev project. This can either be done one-by-one or in bulk.
To attached a PDF to an individual record, go to the Articles tab and click on an article you would like to add a PDF to. Then click on Upload PDF and navigate to the PDF on your computer. Click Open to upload and attach the PDF to the record.
For larger projects, it is useful to attach PDFs to records in your Sysrev project in bulk. You can use features in citations managers like Zotero and Endnote to automate the harvesting of PDF documents based on article identifiers. Citation managers also facilitate the renaming of PDF files, which is necessary for automatically matching PDFs to the correct Sysrev record based on an identifier, such as PMID, DOI, title, or article id, for example. The default Zotero file renaming conventions will also work! The following video walks you through using Zotero to auto-harvest PDFs and then bulk attach them to records in a Sysrev project.
[video coming soon]
Sysrev also provides two built-in search options: PubMed and OpenAlex.
To do a direct search of these sources, go to Manage -> Add Documents and click on PubMed or OpenAlex. Input your query into the search box and click Search. Examine the search results. If you want to import all of the records click the Import button.
PubMed is the National Library of Medicine's search for the Medline database, one of the largest collections of bibliographic metadata for the biomedical and health sciences literature.
For PubMed, you can do a basic keyword search or use PubMed syntax and field codes for a more structured, transparent and reproducible search. The Sysrev built-in search should return the exact same results as if performing the search on PubMed itself. Contact the Evidence Synthesis Program team if you have questions about designing an effective search query in PubMed! You can also review the PubMed user guide to learn more about complex search queries.
OpenAlex is a multi-disciplinary bibliographic 'catalog' of scholarly papers including information about authors and institutions.
When searching OpenAlex directly, use a simple keyword search like 'wildfires asthma' (which will search for 'wildfires AND asthma' and variations on those terms). You can also do simple nested Boolean search like: (wildfires OR "forest fires") AND (asthma OR lung). Note that OpenAlex searches a huge collection of documents across all disciplines including some full text. As a result, you will likely get a large number of results. Use caution when considering how many results you actually want to import into your Sysrev project.