Record vs Report vs Study: Standard Terminology for the PRISMA Flow Diagrams in Systematic Reviews

Many reviewers are not familiar with the preferred terminology during the systematic reviewing process. They refer to the same or different concepts with confusing terms: article, paper, reference, citation, title, abstract, PDF, full text, trial, research, record, report, and study!

The confusion continues when the reviewers use these terms interchangeably throughout their review writing and in the PRISMA flow diagram. Fortunately, such details are embedded in the free PRISMA flow diagrams templates; however, reviewers may miss the details where the devil hides!

In this short blog, I am trying to explain why using Record, Report, and Study as three standard forms of three relevant concepts can solve this problem and why using the other terminology is not necessarily correct and causes confusion.

Use ‘Record’ instead of Article, Paper, Reference, Citation, Title, or Abstract.

The majority of the search results are coming from bibliographic databases. In data science and databases management, each one of these search results is called a ‘Record’. The collection of such records becomes a Database or a Library.