How I use Rayyan wrong to save time and money during systematic review screening

Summary

Noah from Learn Meta-Analysis demonstrates an unconventional way to use Rayyan during the full-text screening stage of a systematic review. Rather than uploading PDFs and managing the entire review in Rayyan, he uses it to record include/exclude decisions and tally exclusion reasons. He finds this approach free, quick, and more organized than tracking counts in Excel.

Workflow Demonstrated

1. Create a Rayyan review

   • Sign in and create a new review.
   • Enter a review name and any basic details.
   • The example uses 37 references.

2. Export references from Zotero

   • In Zotero, go to File → Export Library.
   • Choose RIS format.
   • Turn off the options to export notes and files.
   • Save the export file, then upload it to Rayyan.
   • Continue through the upload steps, and skip inviting collaborators if they are not needed.

3. Use the references for full-text screening

   • The imported references have already passed the initial screening stage.
   • The reviewer opens each full-text PDF separately from their computer or cloud storage, makes an inclusion decision, and records it in Rayyan.
   • Noah does not use Rayyan’s full-text screening feature or upload PDFs. He prefers to avoid the time required to find and upload each full text individually.

4. Simplify the Rayyan interface

   • Delete the existing included and excluded keyword lists if they clutter the view or are not useful for the review.

5. Record decisions and exclusion reasons

   • Mark each study as Include or Exclude.
   • Add a custom label to explain an exclusion, such as “review” or “did not measure learning.”
   • Apply the label and record the decision.
   • Noah generally ignores Rayyan’s built-in exclusion-reason options because he finds them less useful for his purposes.

6. Use labels and filters to track results

   • Rayyan displays counts for labels, making it easy to see how many studies were excluded for each reason.
   • Filters can be used to find studies with particular decisions or labels.
   • Noah says this saves him from manually counting exclusion reasons in Excel.

Main Takeaway

The video presents Rayyan as a lightweight organizational and counting tool rather than a platform for conducting every stage of screening. Noah uses ASReview for the initial screening, then imports the accepted references into Rayyan to record full-text decisions and track exclusion reasons. He emphasizes that this is his preferred workflow, not necessarily the way Rayyan is designed to be used. The study decisions shown in the demonstration are illustrative.

Speakers and Sources Featured

• Noah — Presenter from Learn Meta-Analysis.
• Rayyan — Screening software discussed and demonstrated.
• Zotero — Reference manager used to export records.
• ASReview — Screening software Noah says he uses for the initial screening stage.