The fundamental building blocks of Sysrev are labels. Labels are customizable and can be Boolean Yes/No labels, categorical labels, or open free text labels. There are also more complex labels called Group labels and an annotation feature for extracting text from PDFs into a label answer. You can also import labels from another project.
These labels can be used in the eligibility screening, data extraction and coding steps of systematic literature reviews, or for helping you organize and categorize items in your Sysrev project.
Below are some tutorials for using these different types of labels.
[Note that you will also see a label type called "Relationship" in Sysrev. This label type is currently non-functional.]
Before we go over how to create and use labels, let's take a look at how labels facilitate the process of reviewing or screening documents along with the different review options. In Sysrev, the review of documents can be done by a single reviewer or collaboratively. For collaborations, Sysrev makes possible blind review (where reviewers do not see the decisions or labels of other reviewers), and provides different review modes to facilitate single or double screening of documents. It also makes it easy to identify where conflicts between reviewers exist, so those conflicts can be resolved by discussion, consensus or a third reviewer.
There are a number of settings that you can adjust to manage your screening and review process. These are found under Manage -> Settings, in the Options box.
We will cover the other review Options in other sections of this guide. Once you have adjusted your review settings, don't forget to click the Save Changes button at the bottom of the Options box!
Any member of the project can review documents (i.e. assign labels to documents). To do so, from the main project page, click the Review tab. On the left-hand side, all of the enabled labels will appear. Once all required labels are answered by the reviewer, the blue Save button will become available. Click Save to record label answers. The next record for review will automatically appear in the window. Reviewers can also choose to skip the record.
Note that depending on the Article Review Priority settings described above, the records will be prioritized by whether or not they have already been reviewed by another reviewer. Other than this sorting, the records are randomly assigned.
The main types of labels in Sysrev are Boolean, Categorical and String:
Each label has a number of different settings including:
There are also settings related to auto-labeling, which are covered in the auto-labeling section of this guide. The following video demonstrates creating labels and walks through some of these settings in more detail.
Label questions can be edited at anytime. However, for categorical labels, categories that have been used in prior labeling in the project cannot be edited or deleted. That said, new categories can be added at any time.
Group labels in Sysrev are essentially labels within labels. They facilitate tabular data extraction by allowing users to extract multiple sets of the same combination of labels. In this way, users can create a nested data extraction structure for more complex projects. The video below describes how to create and use Group labels.
Annotation labels allow users to highlight text in attached PDFs, extracting the highlighted text to a label, and then tag that text with a label option. For example, if you wanted to extract information about the outcomes measured in a study and then assign that extracted text to a defined group of outcome types, you could do this with an annotation label. Or you could simply use this label type to extract highlighted text from PDFs, without applying the additional tag.
Note that you can only do this with attached PDFs. Annotation labels do not work for document metadata (e.g., title/abstract).
Sysrev's Analytics feature provides an in-depth exploration of reviewer decisions across all of the labels in the project. Understanding concordance between reviewers can help identify labels that may not be clearly defined or are being interpreted differently by different reviewers, leading to many conflicts. The following video provides an overview of using the Sysrev Analytics module.