To select research results with a team, you must establish clear inclusion and exclusion criteria, conduct independent blinded screenings, and hold consensus meetings to resolve any disagreements.
Collaborating on a literature search—whether for a systematic review, scoping review, or a group research project—requires a highly structured workflow. Without a clear system, teams risk introducing selection bias, duplicating effort, or missing critical studies.
Here is a step-by-step guide to screening and selecting papers as a research team:
1. Define Inclusion and Exclusion Criteria
Before anyone begins searching academic databases, your team must agree on what makes a paper relevant. Create a shared protocol that outlines strict inclusion and exclusion criteria. Be specific about the required study designs, publication date ranges, target populations, and key variables.
2. Conduct a Pilot Screening
To ensure everyone interprets the criteria the same way, take a random sample of 20 to 50 abstracts and have all team members screen them. Compare the results. If there are major discrepancies, refine your definitions before moving on to the main literature pool. This calibration step saves hours of frustrating revisions later in the project.
3. Screen Titles and Abstracts Independently
Divide your search results among the team, ensuring that at least two researchers review every title and abstract independently. Reviewers should vote to "Include," "Exclude," or "Maybe" without seeing their partner’s choices. This blinded approach is essential for maintaining the integrity of your methodology and preventing bias.
4. Perform Full-Text Screening
Once you have narrowed down the initial list, retrieve the full PDFs for the tentatively included articles. Repeat the independent screening process by reading the full text. Document the exact reasons for excluding any papers at this stage, as you will need this data if you are documenting your methodology in a PRISMA flow diagram.
5. Resolve Conflicts
You will inevitably have conflicting votes during both the abstract and full-text screening phases. Schedule a consensus meeting to discuss these specific disagreements. If the two primary reviewers cannot agree on whether to include a paper, a third senior team member should step in to act as a tiebreaker.
6. Centralize and Extract Data
After filtering down to your final included studies, you need a shared workspace to manage the documents and begin data extraction. Using a tool like WisPaper's My Library allows you to organize the team's selected references in a Zotero-style manager and even use AI to chat with your uploaded papers to quickly extract key methodologies, data points, and findings for your final review.
