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Title and abstract screening is not about deciding whether a paper is good or reading it in full. Your task is to identify clearly ineligible records while retaining anything that could reasonably meet your review criteria.
Read Guide →You do not need the full text of every record your search retrieves. Retrieve it when a paper remains potentially eligible or when the title and abstract do not provide enough information for a defensible decision.
Read Guide →An unclear abstract is not evidence that a study is ineligible. When essential information is missing, keep the record under consideration and obtain enough information to make a defensible decision.
Read Guide →Inclusion and exclusion criteria should be applied consistently, but consistency does not require mechanical interpretation. Learn how to distinguish justified judgment from making exceptions for studies you happen to prefer.
Read Guide →Inclusion criteria can sometimes be changed after screening begins, but not simply because the studies you found are inconvenient. Any amendment should remain faithful to the review question, avoid being driven by study findings, and be documented transparently.
Read Guide →Finding an influential or highly relevant-looking study outside your eligibility criteria creates a difficult choice. Its importance may justify discussing it, but not automatically including it in the evidence being synthesized.
Read Guide →A study should not be excluded merely because it comes from another country or a somewhat different population. The relevant question is whether those differences matter enough to the review question to affect eligibility or how the evidence should be interpreted.
Read Guide →A good exclusion record shows how potentially relevant studies moved from consideration to exclusion. Learn what reasons to record, when detailed documentation is needed, and how to keep those decisions consistent and auditable.
Read Guide →Two reviewers are often used to reduce errors and individual judgment in study selection, but the requirement depends on the review methodology and screening stage. Learn when independent duplicate screening is expected and what “two reviewers” actually means.
Read Guide →A PRISMA flow diagram is designed to show how records identified through a systematic search moved through screening, retrieval, eligibility assessment, and final inclusion. It is appropriate for systematic reviews and many structured evidence syntheses, but not automatically for every literature review.
Read Guide →You rarely need to read every research paper from the first word to the last. Learn a practical multi-pass method for deciding what deserves attention, extracting the important evidence, and knowing when a paper requires a deeper read.
Read Guide →You rarely need to read every research paper from the first word to the last. The depth and order of your reading should depend on why you opened the paper and what you need to learn from it.
Read Guide →Not every paper you find deserves the same amount of attention. Screen its relevance first, then consider whether the evidence, methods, and role it may play in your research justify a deeper reading.
Read Guide →You do not need the same depth of understanding for every research paper you encounter. The more consequential the paper is to your argument, methodology, or interpretation, the more deeply you need to understand the parts on which you rely.
Read Guide →Good research notes are not miniature copies of the papers you read. Record what you will need later: the study's question, relevant evidence, limitations, your interpretation, and why the paper matters to your research.
Read Guide →Do not extract everything simply because it appears in the paper. Capture the study's question, context, design, sample or data, relevant measures or procedures, findings, limitations, and why the study matters to your research.
Read Guide →Remembering a paper is less important than being able to recover why it mattered. Leave a compact retrieval trail that records its contribution, relevance to your work, key evidence, limitations, connections, and what you intended to do with it.
Read Guide →Yes. Publication in a prestigious journal can be a useful signal about selectivity and scholarly attention, but it does not guarantee that an individual study is methodologically strong or that its conclusions are justified.
Read Guide →Every study has limitations, but not every limitation invalidates its findings. The key question is whether a methodological problem merely weakens or narrows an inference, or prevents the study from supporting its central claim at all.
Read Guide →A paper can change status after publication through a correction, expression of concern, or retraction. Before relying on an important study, check the publisher's current record and relevant scholarly databases rather than assuming the version you found reflects its present status.
Read Guide →Discovering serious problems in an important paper does not automatically tell you what to do next. Verify the problem, determine which claims it affects, reassess the surrounding evidence, and revise your own conclusions in proportion to the damage.
Read Guide →Research studies do not always reach the same conclusion, and disagreement does not automatically mean that one study is wrong. Learn how to compare apparently conflicting findings and judge what the wider body of evidence actually supports.
Read Guide →A literature containing both positive and null studies is not automatically contradictory. The pattern may reflect differences in precision, effect size, populations, methods, or genuine variation, so interpretation should begin with estimates and uncertainty rather than a count of significant findings.
Read Guide →Newer research is not automatically better research. Publication date can matter when methods, technologies, populations, or contexts have changed, but the evidential value of a study depends primarily on what it investigated and how well it did so.
Read Guide →Research studies should not receive equal weight merely because they appear in the same literature review. Learn how to judge which evidence should influence your conclusion more without relying on shortcuts such as sample size, recency, journal prestige, or a simple hierarchy of study designs.
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