Priority Screening for Systematic Reviews: All you need to know

Farhad
5 min readMay 10, 2023
Progress Graph in Priority Screening for Systematic Reviews (EPPI-Reviewer)
Progress Graph in Priority Screening for Systematic Reviews (EPPI-Reviewer); Source: https://eppi.ioe.ac.uk/CMS/Portals/35/machine_learning_in_eppi-reviewer_v_7_web_version.pdf

Love it or hate it, machine learning and artificial intelligence hacked their way into our lives, and those who can use them to their advantage live longer and work shorter.

If you are one of those systematic reviewers still using EndNote to screen your search results, I must respectfully guide you toward the industry news: Priority Screening is here to stay.

We cannot waste more hours on screening. We are done going through all those sensitive search results; the machine is here to help without interrupting your independence. And God knows we’ve paid our dues!

What is Priority Screening?

In the systematic review and evidence synthesis context, priority screening is screening those search results that are identified by the machine learning model as relevant/undecidable as the priority. The rest of the results could be either ignored or viewed and marked as irrelevant by one human reviewer.

Priority Screening has three requirements:

  1. Human Screener: The human…

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Farhad

An Evidence Scientist with a Pinch of Career and Life Lessons