The purpose of article screening is to remove studies that are clearly not related to the topic. It is done in two phases. First, reviewers refer to their designated inclusion/exclusion criteria to screen title and abstracts for relevance and appropriateness. Once titles and abstracts have been screened, the full text must be retrieved and screened to determine whether the study fits the eligibility criteria for the synthesis.
Screening is done independently by two reviewers, with a third as a tiebreaker.
Systematic review management tools such as Excel and Covidence can be beneficial during the article screening phase -- see the next section for more information.
