Title and Abstract Screening Workflow

Set your criteria and rank

Start in the Relevance criteria section. Enter Include concepts one per line, with commas separating synonyms of the same concept. Enter Exclude signals the same way; matching text is highlighted red and the record is flagged, but nothing is ever auto-removed. Click Load example to see a worked set.

Click Rank by relevance to order the list so likely includes surface first. Once you have made some decisions, click Learn from my decisions: it trains an active-learning classifier on your include and exclude calls so far and re-ranks the remaining records. Ranking is a high-recall safety net: it orders records, it does not decide them, and borderline records stay visible.

One caveat: ranking reads titles and abstracts, so records with no abstract rank on title alone and can sit lower than they should. The tool flags these records; use Fetch missing abstracts in the import section and screen any remaining title-only records yourself.

Screen each record

Every record card shows the title, source, year, and abstract with your criteria highlighted. Decide with Include, Maybe, or Exclude. Anything borderline should be a Maybe: title and abstract screening aims for recall, and Maybe records move forward to full-text screening where the real call is made.

The filter tabs above the list (Included, Maybe, Excluded, Duplicates) let you revisit any group, and the Search records box filters by text. Sort by score appears after ranking. A Bulk triage control can exclude undecided records scoring below a threshold you choose; it is reversible with Undo and best reserved for the clearly irrelevant tail after calibration.

Keyboard shortcuts

Screening is much faster on the keyboard. The defaults are: i include, e exclude, m maybe, j next record, k previous record, o expand or collapse the abstract, z undo the last decision, and ? to toggle the help overlay.

All shortcuts are remappable. Open the Preferences panel (the gear button in the header, titled Preferences: theme, highlights, reading size, keyboard shortcuts) and assign any single character per action under Keyboard shortcuts. Duplicate keys are rejected so no two actions can collide.

PICO highlighting

Beyond include and exclude terms, you can highlight population, intervention, comparator, and outcome terms in distinct colors. Open the PICO term lists in the criteria section and enter terms per category, separated by commas or new lines. Matching is rule-based whole-word matching, colored per category in every title and abstract, saved with the project, and involves no AI.

Preferences and dictionaries

The Preferences panel also controls the theme (Light, Dark, or System), a color-blind-safe highlights option that switches every highlight and PICO color to a distinguishable palette, and the Reading size for record text. All preferences are stored in your browser only.

Highlight dictionaries let you reuse term sets across projects on the same device. In the Dictionaries block of the criteria section, click Save current as, name the set, and click Save. In any other project, choose the dictionary from the list and click Apply to load its include, exclude, and PICO terms.