PRISMA, briefly
PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses) is a checklist and a flow diagram that reviewers — and journals — expect you to follow. The flow diagram tracks four counts:
- Identified from databases and registers.
- Screened by title and abstract.
- Sought for retrieval — full text requested.
- Included in synthesis.
Systematic Review specifically helps with step 3 — sought for retrieval — by labelling how each full text was found, and by recording paywalled articles distinctly from articles you actually excluded.
Writing inclusion / exclusion
Good criteria are specific, observable, and applied before screening starts. The PICO frame — Population, Intervention, Comparator, Outcome — is a useful skeleton. For a scoping review, swap in PCC (Population, Concept, Context).
Dual screening
Two reviewers screen independently, then reconcile disagreements. Systematic Review's PDF text check is advisory — it counts keyword hits to help you skim a long article. It is not a second reviewer.
Your audit trail
Export the download log from /app/exports at the end of each batch. Append the file to your protocol appendix. Supervisors and editors can then verify which public source produced each PDF — without taking your word for it.