The Data Extraction stage in Rayyan helps you systematically gather and organize detailed information from your included studies. This process is essential to capture key data points for analysis and synthesis, ensuring your systematic review is thorough and well-structured.
Steps to Extract Data in Rayyan
1. Access the Data Extraction Stage
From your Review Dashboard, click on the Data Extraction tab to begin. This stage is designed for extracting information from articles you’ve already screened.
2. Add Articles
You can add articles from either:
- The Screening Stage, or
- The Full-Text Screening (FTS) Stage.
Select from:
- Included list
- Maybe list
- Any Labelled articles
This flexibility allows you to extract data only from relevant records.
3. Upload PDFs
If PDFs weren’t uploaded earlier, you can upload them now. These files will help you answer your extraction questions more effectively during the process.
4. Create Your Custom Questions
Click the ➕ icon on the right-hand side to add questions.
For each question, you can customize:
- Section name (used to group questions logically)
- Question text
- Answer type (free text or numeric)
- Column title (how it appears in the table)
- Required toggle (mark questions as mandatory)
5. Start Extracting Data
Once your questions are set up, begin entering answers for each article by click on Extract Data from the Toolbar. Data extraction questions appear in drop down tabs during data extraction. Select a section to work on each set of questions.
Use the built-in PDF viewer to:
- Zoom in/out
- Rotate the PDF
- Scroll through the document
- Switch to side-by-side layout for easier comparison
This setup helps you stay organized and efficient.
While answering extraction questions, you have two options per article:
Mark as Complete — when all required questions are filled and you are done.
Save and Continue Later — if you need to pause and return to complete it later.
These options help you manage progress flexibly, especially when working across large sets of articles or collaborating with a team.
6. Filter by Progress
You can filter articles in your extraction list by status:
- All Data — shows all articles
- Not Started — no data entered yet
- Uncompleted — partially filled
- Completed — all questions answered
This is useful for managing workloads and tracking reviewer progress.
7. Blinding & Resolving Conflicts in Data Extraction
When multiple reviewers are working on data extraction, blinding is important to reduce bias and ensure independent work.
Here’s how it works in Rayyan:
While blinding is on, each reviewer completes data extraction independently — they can only see and edit their own answers.
The review owner can turn off blinding at any point to review team progress.
Once blinding is turned off, you can:
✅ Filter by Completed # — for example, “Completed By 1” shows articles completed by one Reviewer, “Completed By 2” by 2 Reviewers, and so on.
✅ Compare answers across reviewers — you can now see where answers for the same article differ between reviewers.
✅ Resolve disagreements — to align the data, each reviewer needs to adjust their answers where mismatches are found, ensuring consistent and agreed-upon extraction results.
✅ Export the final data — once all conflicts are resolved and answers aligned, you can export the clean dataset.
This workflow ensures that your extracted data is both independent at first and harmonized before export — a critical step for maintaining rigor in systematic reviews.
8. Export Results
You can export your extracted data as a CSV file, either:
- All articles, or
- Filtered results only
The download link will be sent to your email and also available in your Review Chat.
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