Progress and results#

During screening, you might want to keep track of your progress and to obtain information for your stopping criteria. This section provides documentation on useful tools for these purposes.

Dashboard#

ASReview LAB offers insightful statistics and charts to help you monitor your progress.

To open the dashboard:

  1. Start ASReview LAB.

  2. Click on Dashboard in the left menu.

For all of the statistics and charts, you can find information on how they work by clicking on the lamp icon in the top right corner of a statistic or chart. Feel free to ask questions about the statistics and charts on the Discussion platform asreview/asreview#discussions.

ASReview LAB progress Dashboard

The Dashboard of a review that almost hit the stopping criteria.#

Stop screening#

On the dashboard, you can set a stopping criteria for your screening. The stopping criterium is a threshold for the number of not relevant records since the last relevant record. If you reach this threshold, you will be asked to stop screening. You can decide to stop screening or to continue. As you will most likely see more not relevant records the longer you screen, the stopping criteria is a useful tool to help you decide when to stop screening.

The stopping treshold is not set by default. You can set the stopping criteria by clicking on the Set threshold button in the top right corner of the dashboard. The circle will turn dark when the threshold is reached. You can set the stopping criteria to any number you like. Choose the treshold that works best for you. Base the threshold on your own experience or simulation studies on simular topics. The ideal threshold is still actively researched.

In a popular discussion on the ASReview Discussion platform, How to stop screening?, several stopping strategies are discussed.

Tip

The wave plot shows the “waves” of irrelevant records. The larger the waves, the more irrelevant records you have seen and the more likely you are ready to stop. The wave plot displays the threshold you set.

Mark project as finished#

When you decide to stop screening, you can mark the project as finished. You can undo this at any time. To mark your project as finished:

  1. Start ASReview LAB.

  2. Open the project you want to mark as finished.

  3. Click on Dashboard if you are not there yet.

  4. Click on In review in the top right corner of the dashboard.

  5. Click on Mark as finished.

Continuing screening is now disabled. This can be undone by clicking again on Finished and resume the review.

Tip

You can find some interesting estimates of the time saved on the dashboard after marking the project as finished.

Export dataset#

At any moment during the screening process, you can export your dataset. This includes the labels you provided, the data you imported, and some additional variables. You can export your dataset to a RIS, CSV, TSV, or Excel file.

To download your dataset follow these steps:

  1. Start ASReview LAB.

  2. Open a project.

  3. Click on Collection in the menu on the left.

  4. Click on the Export button in the top right corner of the screen.

  5. Select the records you want to export.

  6. Click on Export.

Note

A RIS file can only be exported if a RIS file is imported.

Variables in the exported dataset#

The exported dataset contains the labels you provided during screening, the data you imported, and some additional variables. The following table lists the additional variables that are included in the exported dataset:

Variables in the exported dataset#

Variable

Description

asreview_label

Contains the labels provided by the user: 1 for relevant, 0 for not relevant, and missing if the record was not seen during screening.

asreview_time

Contains the datatime of the screening decision.

asreview_note

Contains any notes made by the user during screening.

asreview_user_name

Contains the name of the user who made the screening decision (if applicable).

asreview_user_email

Contains the email of the user who made the screening decision (if applicable).

For RIS files, the variables are stored in the N1 (Notes) field. The asreview_label variable is stored with the ASReview_relevant and ASReview_irrelevant tags to find them easily via search option in a reference manager.

Order of the records in the exported dataset#

The file is ordered as follows:

  1. All relevant records you have seen in the order they were shown during the screening process.

  2. All records not seen during the screening and ordered from most to least relevant according to the last iteration of the model.

  3. All non-relevant records are presented in the order these are shown during the screening process.