Systematic review

Screening without losing the audit trail

How the Systematic Review service applies your eligibility criteria record by record, and why every include/exclude decision keeps its reason attached.

Last updated 12 June 2026 · 5 min read

A screening pass is only defensible if a reader can reconstruct it. That is why the Systematic Review service in SciExpert never returns a bare verdict: each record carries the criterion that decided it and the sentence the decision was based on.

You write the eligibility criteria once, in plain language — population, intervention, comparator, outcome, study design, language and date bounds. The screening pass then evaluates each retrieved record against those criteria and produces an include, exclude or unclear verdict with a reason.

Records marked unclear are the important ones. They are the records where the abstract does not contain enough information to decide, and they are exactly the records a human should read in full text. Treating them as a separate bucket keeps recall high without inflating the include list.

Everything exports to CSV, so the screening log can sit alongside the PRISMA counts in your supplementary material.

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