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

Important Notice: The Rayyan legacy interface was discontinued on October 1, 2024. Please visit the New Rayyan Help Center Article for updated instructions.

Rayyan was designed to allow you to start working on your reviews right away without requiring any configuration. To assign reviews to different members of your review team, there are a few simple recommended approaches that require very little effort to implement. Number 3 in the list below is how Rayyan was designed to simplify reference assignment, but review teams often use Number 1 or 2 below 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 is assigned A through L, Reviewer 3 & 4 is 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 on 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 workbench, 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.
   
   

   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.
     
     However, to show concurrent decisions by other collaborators, you may need to deselect/select the at least/at most filters. In addition, delays may cause these counts to be outdated until the screen is refreshed.
     The above three 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.