Imagine 25 years ago. You are working on a systematic review. You are making hard copies of reports and studies, manually highlighting the relevant information, filing included studies in a cabinet and moving the excluded studies elsewhere. Your eyes are strained, you’ve been working on this for...
Picture it: you’re embarking on a new systematic review. The research question is timely and important, and you’re excited to see what the evidence reveals.
However, your heart sinks at the thought of the thousands of papers that you and your team are likely to sift through over the weeks and...
* This post has been updated on April 30, 2020 to reflect the extension of the EU MDR deadline due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
In April 2017, the European Parliament and Council adopted two new Medical Device Regulations (MDRs). Regulation 2017/745 sets quality and safety standards for devices...
Whether you’re choosing your next car or replacing your worn out sneakers, it's generally a good idea to do your research before you pull out your wallet.
The same applies when looking for software to help with your systematic review process. The tools available in this space vary greatly and it...
Systematic reviews are viewed as the gold standard for evidence-based research. Used in a wide variety of healthcare fields including health economics outcomes research (HEOR), regulatory compliance, guidelines development, and evidence-based medicine, they are also gaining traction as a policy...
Dual screening is a best practice for conducting systematic reviews, but there’s often not enough time or resources to have two people screen each reference. Good news: DistillerSR’s new automated screening tool, DistillerAI, can be used as the second screener. That’s right - you now have a...
DistillerAI made its global debut on Feb 11, 2018 in the latest release of the DistillerSR systematic review software platform. Since then, researchers around the world have been testing it and applying it to their literature reviews. In the process, they’ve discovered a few best practices for...
The buzz about artificial intelligence (AI) just keeps getting louder. For the evidence-based research set, the potential of computer-based tools to automate screening and data extraction in systematic reviews has researchers excited about the possibilities - and maybe a little bit fearful of...
Many groups choose to do the data extraction phase of their systematic review in Distiller systematic review software for the same reasons they do screening in DistillerSR:
Two vital tenets of the systematic review process are transparency and reproducibility. I have long argued that both should apply at every stage of the review process, including title and abstract screening.
There are two schools of thought on title and abstract screening when it comes to the...