A guide to Sysrev for collaborative literature and document reviews

Under the Articles tab, Sysrev provides numerous ways to filter the articles in your project. The filters affect things like exporting, auto-labeling and the creation of child projects, making these a useful way to manage your project data and workflows. The following section provides more information about how to make the most out of Sysrev's filtering options.

You can filter your list of articles that appear in the articles tab in one of two ways: clicking on a preset article filter from the Overview tab of your project or manually setting up one or more filters using the Article Filters from the Articles tab of your project.

First, you can quickly get to commonly used article subsets from the Overview page of your Sysrev project by clicking on the numbers in the Review Status box, the bars in the Member Activity barplot, or the bars in the Answer Counts box.

For more custom filtered sets, you can use the Article Filters on the Articles tab and create article subsets based on:

•     the original source of the record (e.g., which file upload)
•     consensus status (e.g., whether there are conflicts among reviewers' label answers)
•     label values
•     auto-label answers

You can apply multiple filters using AND logic or OR logic, to limit or expand the list, respectively. You can also use the filters to include or exclude records from the list.

To apply filters, go to the Articles tab and click the + (plus) button in the article filters box. Use the drop-down menus to choose the filter type and the criteria on which you want to filter the articles. Choose the Match tab to include records based on these criteria or the Exclude tab to exclude records based on these criteria. Finally, click the Apply button to filter the records in the list.

To add additional filters, click the + (plus) button to further limit the results, and click the + OR (plus OR) button to expand the results.

When filtering on Consensus status:

• Single will filter to records with only one reviewer decision.
• Determined will filter to all articles with two reviewers decisions in agreement and resolved conflicts
• Conflict will filter to only records with two reviewer decisions that are in conflict.
• Consistent will filter to all articles with two reviewers decisions in agreement, not including resolved conflicts
• Resolved will filter to all articles that had a conflict that has been resolved

[video coming soon]

Because Sysrev is designed for maximum customizability, there are many different workflows that might be implemented to manage a document review project. For a standard systematic review (or other typical evidence synthesis workflow), we recommend a three-project approach. In this workflow, the first three phases of the literature review (title/abstract screening, full text screening and data extraction) would be carried out in three separate Sysrev projects, using a combination of filters and child projects as follows: