Single screen of citations with excluded terms: An approach to citation screening in systematic reviews

Abstract

Citation screening during the systematic review process can be time-consuming due to the exponentially increasing amount of research. This letter describes an approach to expediting the process by single screening citations that include terms in the abstract and/or keywords related to the exclusion criteria of the systematic review to quickly reject studies with a high likelihood of being excluded from the systematic review. This method can potentially improve the efficiency of the citation screening process while maintaining the quality of the systematic review; however, future research is needed to further validate this approach.