HTHRHSC 4590

Systematic and scoping reviews typically have several standard screening stages:

1. Duplicates: Since you are searching in multiple databases, you will likely find many articles multiple times.  The first thing to do during screening is to remove all the duplicate records.  Covidence and most citation managers can do this for you automatically.  However, be sure not to delete the duplicates completely.  Instead move them to a separate folder or collection so that you can have a record of how many duplicates were removed and report this number out in your PRISMA flow diagram.
2. Title & Abstract: Due to the nature of a comprehensive search, it is likely that you will retrieve a lot of irrelevant results in your initial pool.  Therefore, the next step is to quickly screen the titles and abstracts of all retrieved items to get rid of the obviously irrelevant items.  You can usually easily identify items that are definitely not related to your research topic.  Anything that you are unsure about should be moved to the next phase to make sure.
3. Full Text: Once you have removed all the items that are obviously irrelevant, you will go out and retrieve the full text of all the remaining articles for closer evaluation.  This is where you inclusion and exclusion criteria will be applied more rigorously.

Blinded Screening

Ideally, both the title/abstract and full text screening stages should utilize a blinded screening model.  This means that two reviewers will vote on every article and they will not know how the other person voted.  This helps prevent influence or bias from being introduced into the project.

In the event that the two reviewers disagree, a third reviewer should be asked to resolve the conflict by also casting a vote about the item in question.  This process should also be blinded, meaning that the tie-breaker should not know how either of the initial reviewers voted.

To help facilitate the screening process, many reviewers will use a tool such as Covidence to perform their screening.

To sign up for an account under the Ohio State institutional subscription, following the instructions on the following webpage.

They also have an excellent knowledge bank that provides instructions and videos on how to perform almost any task within the system.

Video created by Covidence.

Importing Full Text

When you are ready to perform your full text screening, you will need to first go out and collect the full text articles for each study that has made it to this stage.

Covidence has a PDF bulk import tool that can allow you to bring in multiple full text articles at once.  You must work in tandem with either the EndNote or Zotero citation managers to use this tool.  A link to instructions is below.

Using Interlibrary Loan

If you are unable to locate the full text of a particular item through the OSU Library subscriptions, you can request a copy through Interlibrary Loan (ILL).