Librarians don't typically play a role in the screening and analysis of studies for systematic reviews, but we can offer advice on tools and strategies for managing the process and for working with databases and large number of citations.
Some people prefer to screen, sort and save results within the database interfaces. If using EBSCO databases for your systematic searches, these strategies might be helpful. You'll need to create a myEBSCO account and be signed in.
Display Results by Date: Choose to sort by "Date Newest" rather than "Relevance." Now the system will sort results the same way each time. Ifreviewing results over multiple sessions, simply note the date you stopped reviewing and start there next time.
Display Abstracts: Under "Page Options," select "Detailed." This will make the abstract appear on the results page.
Display More Results: Under "Page Options" select "Results per Page: 50." This will make it easier to page to older results
Create Folders: In your Folder, on the bottom-left corner, set up YES, NO and UNDECIDED subfolders. Once subfolders are created, you can add results to these folders by simply clicking on the blue folder image next to each result and select where you'd like the result to be sorted. Articles that match your inclusion criteria go to into YES. Excluded results can be sorted into NO. Results you're initially unsure of go into UNDECIDED, and you can come back to these later. Once screening is complete, you'll have a clear record of each article that you will include and exclude from the study and your YES folder results can be exported for coding.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 Generic License.