How to Organize Your Review Team Using Rayyan for Systematic Literature Reviews (Rayyan Beta)

Rayyan was designed to allow you to start working on your reviews immediately without requiring any configuration. To assign reviews to different members of your review team, there are a few simple recommended approaches that are effortless to implement. Number 4 in the list below is how Rayyan was designed to simplify reference assignment for more than two reviewers, but review teams often use other methods for their simplicity as well. 

1. All References - the default scenario typically involves two reviewers who review all references, so no division of labor or reference assignment is required. This is the vast majority of use cases, especially for smaller reviews. You simply invite your collaborator and get started. 
2. By Alphabet - Assign different members of the review team references using the alphabet (e.g. Reviewer 1 & 2 are assigned A through L, Reviewer 3 & 4 are assigned M through Z, etc.)
3. By Searches - Divide your set of references into different files or "searches" and upload these search files to Rayyan. They will then be listed under the Search methods box. You can then ask each group of collaborators to work on a specific search by selecting the file they are assigned. Selecting the filename will act as a filter so they will only see the references contained within their assigned filed. The .gif below shows how this can be done.
4. By Minimum/Maximum collaborator decision - using the facets by the same name found in the filters, you can ask each reviewer to start reviewing references by selecting the "At most 1" decision filter to review only the reference articles with 0 or 1 decisions. This causes your review team members to only see articles awaiting a first or second decision to avoid making more than 2 decisions per reference. This allows you to divide references without formal assignment using a numerical target per reviewer. They simply make decisions on a certain number of articles and can work in any manner on any random selection of articles without having to specify more than the number of references they should make a decision on. This also allows review teams to divide the work any way they choose. 

Some use cases where the Minimum and Maximum collaborator decisions facets can be used are:

• If you filter by At most 1 in the Maximum collaborator decisions box, this will show all the articles that have 1 or 0 decisions. 
• If you filter by At least 1 in the Minimum collaborator decisions box, this will show all the articles that have 1 or more decisions.
• You can also use at least and at most filters in the Minimum and Maximum collaborator decisions facets together to get the articles that have exactly one decision. To do this, you would need to filter by at most 1 and at least 1.

The above options work with Blind Mode On or Off. The following suggestion only works with Blind Mode Off and therefore is useful for instances where blinding is not required:  

    5. By Labeling - Divide your review into groups of citations and then label each group differently. Labelling can be easily done with the keyboard (shift + arrow down and then apply the Label). You can then assign each collaborator to work on a group with a specific label. However, this would mean that you can't turn blind mode on since your labels won't be visible to collaborators with blinding on.