Your search results will often find more articles than will actually be used in your final review. The screening process allows you to filter out those that do not meet your inclusion criteria.
Screening usually involves a minimum of two reviewers, during this process each reviewer will look through each of the studies and if any conflicts are raised they are discussed together with reference to the inclusion and exclusion criteria.
A typical process for screening includes the following steps.
Covidence is a web-based tool that streamlines the production of systematic and scoping reviews. It supports title and abstract, and full-text screening, risk of bias assessment, the extraction of study characteristics and outcomes, and the export of data and references.
Covidence is the primary screening and data extraction tool for Cochrane authors, and has recently been endorsed by the Joanna Briggs Institute.
The University of Newcastle has a Covidence site licence. To create a review:
Watch the Introduction to Covidence Webinar (recorded 4 August 2022) to get started.