ASReview: Software for systematic reviews

ASReview is software designed to accelerate the process of systematic reviews. It is written in python, and uses deep learning to predict which papers should be most likely included in the review. Our software is designed to accelerate the step of screening abstracts and titles with a minimum of papers to be read by a human with no or very few false negatives.

Our Automated Systematic Review (ASR) software implements an oracle and a simulation mode.

  • Oracle The oracle modus is used to perform a systematic review with interaction by the reviewer (the ‘oracle’ in literature on active learning). The software presents papers to the reviewer, whereafter the reviewer classifies them.
  • Simulate The simulation modus is used to measure the performance of our software on existing systematic reviews. The software shows how many papers you could have potentially skipped during the systematic review.

The source code is freely available at GitHub.

Quick Start

The ASR software requires Python 3.6+. The project is available on Pypi. Install the project with:

pip install asreview

The quickest way to start using the Automated Systematic Review (ASR) software is the Command Line Interface (CLI). Start an interactive systematic review (Oracle mode) with the following line in CMD or shell:

asreview oracle YOUR_DATA.csv --prior_included 29 181 379 2001 3928 3929 4547 \
        --prior_included 31 90 892 3898 3989 4390 --log_file results.log

Example output:

To benchmark an already executed review, use the simulation modus (asreview simulation). The dataset needs an additional column (“label_included”) to signify their inclusion in the final review. The command for the simulation modus is similar to the oracle mode.

asreview simulate YOUR_DATA.csv --prior_included 29 181 379 2001 3928 3929 4547 \
        --prior_included 31 90 892 3898 3989 4390 --log_file results.log

Citation

A research paper is upcoming for this project. In the mean time, it can be cited with (fill in x and y for the version number):

ASReview Core Development Team (2019). ASReview: Software for automated systematic reviews [version 0.x.y]. Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands. Available at https://github.com/msdslab/automated-systematic-review.

@Manual{
        title = {ASReview: Software for automated systematic reviews},
        author = {{ASReview Core Development Team}},
        organization = {Utrecht University},
        address = {Utrecht, The Netherlands},
        year = 2019,
        url = {https://pypi.org/project/asreview/}
}

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