After gathering your evidence through comprehensive searches of information sources, your team is ready to screen the studies for inclusion. The standard systematic review utilizes 2 rounds of screening. Typically screening is performed, independently and blinded, by two members of the team.
During the first round, the title and abstracts of all retrieved studies are compared against the predetermined inclusion criteria outlined in the review protocol. Studies which clearly fall outside of the review parameters are excluded from further review. Where the two screeners' decisions conflict with each other, some sort of tie-breaking strategy must be employed. Typically this is done by having a third reviewer weigh in.
After the title/abstract screening is completed and all conflicts resolved, the remaining studies move on to the second round of screening. During this round, the full-text of the studies are reviewed against the predetermined inclusion criteria outlined in the review protocol. As before, the full-text screening is performed by two screeners, independently and blinded to each other's decisions. Afterwards, conflicts are resolved in the same manner as before. The studies that make it through this final round of screening are the ones which will be used for the final synthesis and/or analysis.
There are many excellent resources out there to help review teams screen studies for evidence synthesis.
Currently SJSU Library does not provide institutional access to any subscription-based systematic review tools. Instead we recommend the following free tools. Also consider that some subscription-based systematic review software, such as PICO Portal, provide free trials that could last for one project.
Note: if you have departmental research support or grant funding, you may want to consider one of many great subscription-based products. Refer to the Systematic Review Software Comparison chart put together by librarians at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa Health Sciences Library to compare leading free and subscription-based tools.
The citation management software EndNote can be used throughout an evidence synthesis review, including during the screening steps.