Review settings

What the settings cover

Settings are grouped by the stage that reads them. The question framework decides which criteria a review has at all — a PICO review has an intervention and a comparator, a PEO review has an exposure and no comparator — and the rest of the review follows from that: the screening questions you are asked, the arms extraction looks for, the wording of the prompts, and which appraisal instruments are offered.

• Search. The terms each concept contributes to a draft strategy. The strategy you commit is always yours: settings propose a draft and never rewrite a saved one.
• Screening. Which criteria must be met to include a study, whether a comparator is required, the confidence threshold, and whether the review is screened by one reviewer or two.
• Extraction. Which outcomes are collected, and how a study’s arms are matched to the review’s.
• Appraisal. Which critical-appraisal instruments apply, and to which study designs.
• Synthesis and certainty. How results are combined, and which certainty method rates them.

Every save is a version

Saving settings creates a new version rather than overwriting the last one. History lists every save with what it changed, compared either with the settings before it or with the settings now, and you can restore any earlier save — which itself becomes a new version, so nothing is lost by going back.

The methods your review ran under are part of its record. A report cites the settings each stage used at the time it ran, not the settings as they stand today.

What happens to earlier results

Changing settings never deletes work. Results produced under earlier settings are kept, and the stage they belong to tells you they were produced under different settings so you can decide whether to re-run. That decision is yours: a changed screening threshold may matter a great deal, while a reworded outcome label may not.

Pages that follow your settings

The workflow in the sidebar lists the stages your review actually runs. A qualitative review shows its coding and synthesis steps and no trial analysis; a review with no appraisal instrument or no certainty model has no step for it. One Appraisal step opens the instruments your review uses — risk of bias, a qualitative checklist, or both for a mixed-methods review — and one certainty step, named after your certainty model, opens its ratings. A mixed-methods review’s certainty step holds the trial and the qualitative ratings side by side. Links you already have to the individual pages keep working. Owners and administrators can show every stage from the sidebar.

Screening lists every element of your question framework, in the framework’s order and marked required or optional as it defines, and shows the evidence for each study element by element. Frameworks in preview, such as SPIDER, PICo and SPICE, are screened on their own elements. In a qualitative review, the synthesis questions you set are what extraction answers.

A generated report states the methods its analyses ran under — framework, screening policy, extraction approach, appraisal instruments and certainty model, each by name and version — and says so when the analyses it cites ran under different settings. The report, provenance and version history pages show the same summary.

Copying settings between reviews

A new review can start from a template, from another review, or from a settings file exported from one. What is copied is review intent only: the framework, the criteria, the outcomes and the methodological choices. Search strategies, locks, schedules and results are never copied — a copied review starts its own work.

Exports refuse rather than quietly leave something behind. If a setting cannot be included in the file, you are told which one, so a review created from it is never silently different from the one it was copied from. Starting a new review directly from an existing one copies the same way, so it can stop for the same reason — open that review and settle the setting first, or start from a template instead.

Your team’s review methods (preview)

A team has a library of review methods: the built-in question frameworks, screening policies, extraction approaches, appraisal instruments, certainty models and templates, and the team’s own. Open it from the team’s page under Review methods. Every member can browse it and see which of the team’s reviews use each method; team admins and lead reviewers can add to it.

To adapt a built-in method, fork it and give it a name. The fork starts as a draft that you can edit, and becomes available to the team’s reviews when you publish it. A published method never changes, so the reviews that chose it keep exactly what they chose; to change it, start a new version. A method you no longer want offered can be retired — reviews already using it keep it. If the built-in method a fork came from gains a newer version, the library says so, and you can fork the new one.

From a team review’s settings, Save as a team template keeps its methods and its questions, not its search, studies or results; saving again under the same name adds a new version. The team’s templates are offered when you create a review in that team’s workspace, and the team’s own methods appear in the review settings beside the built-in ones, marked as your team’s. A team question framework is offered only for reviews that are ready to use it.

Suggested wordings

While screening, the screener may propose alternative wordings for your population, intervention or comparator — other ways the same idea appears in the literature. These are used to match studies during screening and to map study arms during extraction. They are not part of your search strategy and answering one does not change it.

You can keep a suggestion or remove it. A removed one is not proposed again, and the Configure page lists what you have removed so you can allow one back if you change your mind.