When you work with a literature study, there can be many references and things to consider at the same time. Screening tools are designed to save you time in the process.

Covidence

The University of Oslo has a license for Covidence. Among other things, Covience can help with:

Screening abstracts
Screening full texts
Extracting data from your selected sources

In Covidence, you get assistance from machine learning to sort through the references you see in the abstract screening, so that you see the most relevant articles earlier.

Read more about machine learning in Covidence here.

Video with an overview of the functions in Covidence

If you use Covidence for the entire process, the tool can generate documentation and a flow sheet (PRISMA) for you, which sums up your workflow.

ASReview

ASReview is a tool that helps with abstract screening. The point of the tool is to use machine learning to shorten the time you use to look through abstracts. ASReview is developed by employees at the University of Utrecht and is completely free to use. It is downloaded as a program extension to Python and runs locally on your machine. Read more about ASReview here.

Machine learning in the screening phase

Sometimes it is not possible to narrow down your research question, so that you are left with thousands of references to plough through. If you are writing your assignment alone, this can be even more daunting. Many research groups choose to use machine learning to make the process more efficient, and several studies (1, 2) show that the use of machine learning can save you between 60-90% of the time you would spend screening everything, at the same finding 95% of the relevant studies. Machine learning in screening is possible in both Covidence and ASReview.

If the amount of references you are going to screen seems insurmountable, or if you want to know more about screening tools, it can be wise to get in touch with the library for help.