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Systematic Reviews and Knowledge Synthesis for the Sciences

Article Screening

Article screening involves taking all of the search results your team has found and evaluating them against your inclusion and exclusion criteria to determine whether the articles are included in your final dataset.

 

First Round of Screening (Title/Abstract)

The first round of screening involves reading the title and abstract and evaluating whether these fall within your inclusion criteria (included in final dataset).

 

Second Round of Screening (Full Text)

The second round of screening involves reading the full text of the article and evaluating whether the article falls within your inclusion (included in final dataset) criteria. Please note this will involve uploading the full text of all articles that were included after the first round of title and abstract screening (see below).

  • Screening template for full text screening (from Ana Patricia Ayala and Kathryn Barrett, University of Toronto Libraries)

Article Screening Software

Locating Full Text of Articles

Once you have exported your search results and completed the first round of screening, you will need to locate the full text of the remaining results. Often this is easy enough: use our Library Search, Google Scholar, or database of your choice to search for the source.

Reference management software often has a feature to automatically find the full text of a source. For example, EndNote's full text finder and Zotero's find available PDF features.