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Rayyan for Systematic Reviews

Gradual phasing out of this guide

 

Gradual phasing out of Rayyan support
Since Rayyan has now moved to a paid-subscription model, we will no longer be supporting Rayyan, and this guide is no longer being updated. McGill now has an institutional subscription to Covidence, a screening tool with more robust features than Rayyan. Please visit McGill's Covidence page for more information.

Moving from title/abstract to full text screening

Rayyan does not currently offer a simple way of hiding articles that have been excluded after the title/abstract stage.  

For this reason, we recommend exporting the included articles and using them to A) create a new Rayyan review for full text screening and B) creating a new EndNote library for the management of PDFs.

Creating the full text screening review in Rayyan

To create an RIS file of included articles:

1. Open your project

2. Limit your results to "Included" using the bar on the left hand

Rayyan screening screenshot

3. Click on "Export" at the top of the screen

4. Choose filtered results only and RefMan (RIS) format. Leave all tick boxes checked. Click on Export.

Rayyan results export screen

The results will be emailed to you in a zip file.  Unzip these results, and import the RIS file into a new project (click here for a reminder on how to do this).  We suggest giving your new project the same name as used for the title/abstract stage, with the addition of the words "FULL TEXT STAGE".

Using Endnote to manage PDFs for full text screening

Creating an EndNote library for PDF management

Using the same file that you exported from Rayyan, you will create a new EndNote library to manage the PDFs for full text screening.

1. Create a new EndNote library.

2. Go to File-->Import and select the same RIS file you had imported into Rayyan to create the full text screening review to import the references into the new EndNote library.

3. Use the "find full text" features of EndNote to find and attach the PDFs in EndNote.

4. Screen the full text PDFs within EndNote and record your decisions in Rayyan.

PDF management within Rayyan

It is possible to upload PDFs one by one into Rayyan. However we encourage users to find another way (like EndNote) to manage their PDFs.

Uploading an article PDF full-text is possible under 2 different settings. 

You can upload the PDF as 'public' content meaning that all Rayyan users can see and access it if they have the same citation in their reviews regardless of if they are collaborators or not.

Upload as public: All users can see the PDF full-texts if they have the same articles in other reviews. 

Upload as private: Only users having access to this review can see the PDF full-texts. 

DISCLAIMER: Make sure you don't upload copyrighted files as public, you hold the complete responsibility for any copyright infringements.

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