A guide to practicing Open Science with Sysrev Part 1: Data sharing

A guide to practicing Open Science with Sysrev Part 2: Data reuse

Creating a new project

Child Projects & Clones

Adding and managing team members

Using built-in search functions

Adding documents from database searches

Adding PDFs to new or existing documents

Label Analytics

Export formats: XML, Excel and Parquet

Overview of adding and removing documents in Sysrev

Suggested workflow for testing and running the Auto-labeler

FAQs

Foresight Management reduces SDS processing time by 80% using Sysrev.

Carnegie Mellon advances research and education with Sysrev

Contact us

Project and review settings

Sorting articles

How to use the Auto-labeler

Using filters to leverage Sysrev predictions

Tips for optimizing your Auto-label prompts

Suggested workflow for structured literature review projects

About the Sysrev's prediction model

The prediction histogram

Navigating the Overview page

Overview of labels and reviewing documents

About Sysrev article filters

How to use Sysrev article filters

Overview of Sysrev's Auto-labeler

Understanding the Auto-label Report

How to export from Sysrev

Creating and managing labels

Group labels

Display options and Presets

Importing labels from other projects

Data Security & Privacy

Reasoning with Confidence

Reviewing documents with one or more reviewers

Demos and tutorials

Resolving conflicting reviewer answers

Sysrev in the Classroom: Enhancing Research Literacy Through Collaborative Reviews

August 2025 - Release Notes

September 2025 - Release Notes

November 2025 - Release Notes 

October 2025 - Release Notes 

Removing documents from a Sysrev project

A guide to practicing Open Science with Sysrev Part 3: A real-world example

Sysrev API

Auto-labeler pricing and payments

Prefill label answers with the Auto-labeler

January 2026 - Release Notes 

December 2025 - Release Notes

February 2026 - Release Notes  

Sysrev for Medical Librarians

How to Use Sysrev

Starting a New Project

Adding (and Removing) Documents

Labeling & Reviewing Documents

Filtering & Sorting

Using Sysrev's Prediction Model

Using the Sysrev Auto-labeler

Exporting Data

Tips and Workflows

Success Stories

More to explore

Sysrev in Practice

Release Notes

<h2>Starting a new project</h2>Once logged in, create a new project by clicking the New button:<figure class="image"><img src="https://cdn-assets.productfruits.com/31deaa85-5c4f-4c24-929c-483f516029bc"></figure>You can choose whether to create the project under your main Sysrev user profile or under an Organization. If you have access to an Enterprise license of Sysrev, you should see an option to choose the Enterprise Organization as the project owner. If you have already created other Organizations in your account, these will also be available in the drop-down list. Note that if you are an Enterprise user, you will have access to premium features regardless of the Organization in which you create your account.After selecting one of the options, you must decide if you would like your project to be publicly viewable or private. See below for more information about public and private projects. &nbsp;<figure class="image image_resized" style="width:478px;"><img src="https://d2jv02qf7xgjwx.cloudfront.net/accounts/117978/images/new_project2.png" alt="Choose project owner and privacy settings"></figure><h3>What is the difference between a Public and Private project?</h3>Public projects can be used to share the labels, article metadata, users, and other information within the review with anyone with the project URL. Public projects also make reviews discoverable through Google search. Data created in publicly accessible reviews are re-usable by other reviewers and data scientists. With public projects, anyone with a Sysrev account can <a href="https://help.sysrev.com/en/article/child-projects-clones">clone your project,</a> including article metadata, labels and label answers. Note that PDF attachments are only visible to project members. People not affiliated with your project will not be able to view PDF attachments in public projects.Private projects are viewable only by you and your collaborators. Private projects will not show up in Google search results or be publicly visible. They can only be viewed after a user is granted permission from a project administrator. Note that if you created a project as part of an organization, all other members in your organization will also be able to see the details of your project.&nbsp;<h3>Project names</h3>Project names can only contain letters, numbers and dashes. No spaces or other characters are allowed.<h2>Transferring a project&nbsp;</h2>While you cannot transfer ownership of a project to another Sysrev user, you can transfer projects between Organizations of which you are a member or owner. Keep in mind that if you transfer a private project to an account without premium, it will be inaccessible unless you make the project public or pay for a subscription.If you would like to transfer a project into an Enterprise license account or a different one of your Organizations, first open the project. Next, open the Manage -&gt; Settings dashboard, click the Transfer button, and choose which Organization the project should be transferred to.&nbsp;<figure class="image image_resized" style="width:88.39%;"><img src="https://cdn-assets.productfruits.com/53efcf4a-2cf6-4dd1-98b9-0081ba30277e"></figure><h2>Disabling a project</h2>You can remove a project from your project list by clicking the Enable project toggle in the Danger Zone (in Manage -&gt; Settings). Once disabled, you can still access the project using the project URL and can re-enable it to return it to your list. Note that projects in Sysrev cannot be completely deleted from the system.&nbsp;<h2>Sysrev Organizations</h2>Sysrev Organizations offer another level of project management and organization. To create a new Organization under your main user account, go to your Sysrev account page by clicking on your username in the upper right hand corner. Then click on the Organization tab. Enter a name in the Organization Name field and click Create. Note that Organization names may only contain letters, numbers, and hyphens.<figure class="image image_resized" style="width:92.22%;"><img src="https://cdn-assets.productfruits.com/702dae74-9594-44b2-90ab-7d97bc984967"></figure>You can now create new projects and manage members within the Organization. You can also allow any member of the Organization to join any project within the Organization, or turn that option off, such that Organization members can only join a project if invited by the project admin or owner.<figure class="image image_resized" style="width:91.78%;"><img src="https://cdn-assets.productfruits.com/77f958a4-b7d7-42cf-a157-d7f2cf6762a6"></figure>Note that at this time, Organizations cannot be renamed or deleted.

Your label description acts as the generative AI prompt that is used by the Auto-labeler to apply label answers to each record. For categorical labels, the Auto-labeler will also access the Categories to retrieve its answers. To set up your labels for auto-labeling, go to Manage -&gt; Label Definitions. Click on the gear icon for an existing label to edit it or create a new one by clicking on the Create New Label button.<h2>1. Set your label description prompt and Auto-label settings</h2>In this example, we have created a categorical label and want the Auto-labeler to answer the question "In what geographic region was this study conducted?", providing the following answers: Africa, North America, Caribbean, Asia, Central America, South America, Oceania, Europe, Middle East, not specified.&nbsp;Note: We included a 'not specified' option, but if we didn't, the Auto-labeler would be forced to select an answer, even if incorrect. We could turn off "Require answer", allowing the auto-labeler to skip the article if no answer is appropriate.In this example, we have selected the following Auto-labeler options:&nbsp;<ul><li>toggled ON the Enable Auto Extraction so that the Auto-labeler runs on this label;&nbsp;</li><li>toggled OFF Use Full Texts, so the Auto-labeler only looks at the metadata (title and abstract) and not any attached PDFs;&nbsp;</li><li>toggled ON Reasoning with Confidence, to enable the built-in chain-of thought reasoning questions that can be added to the prompt.&nbsp;</li></ul><figure class="image"><img src="https://cdn-assets.productfruits.com/e8abb262-911c-4bc8-bb9a-5c01f7aeba91"></figure>&nbsp;Note: The <a href="https://help.sysrev.com/en/article/probability-reasoning">Reasoning with Confidence</a> will add a set of built-in reasoning steps (known as 'chain-of thought' prompting) to your prompt and will likely impact Auto-labeler performance. It is useful to run your prompt with and without this feature selected to determine which setting works better in your case.<h2>2. Set up your article filter and Auto-label limit</h2>After clicking Save, we can go back to the Articles tab to set the articles that we want to Auto-label. In this example, we filtered for only records that have been included by two reviewers. We set our Max Articles (the number of records we want the Auto-labeler to label) to 10. You can see that the Auto-labeler has provided a breakdown of the cost and estimated the cost of this run to be $0.05<figure class="image"><img src="https://cdn-assets.productfruits.com/63fd0b74-3be2-4202-96bc-c9a9d22a1413"></figure>When you are ready, and your selection does not exceed the budget in your account, click the Run Auto-label button. Upon successful completion, the message "Last run just now: success" will appear at the bottom of the Auto-labeler box. To view Auto-label answers, click on one of the labeled articles from the list and scroll down. Below the article abstract you will see the Auto-label answers. In this example, you can see that the Auto-label identified ecological and environmental impacts in this study record. It also included this record with 80% certainty.Note: If instead of Last run just now: success, there is an indication that some of the run failed, simply click the Run Auto-label again. It will only run again on the failed items and often will succeed on a second try.<h2>3. Review auto label answers</h2>Once you run the Auto-labeler, you will see Auto-label answers at the bottom of each record as shown in the image above. If you enabled "Reasoning with Confidence", you can view the Auto-labeler's reasoning process by clicking on the dropdown arrow next to the Auto-label answer.In this example, we can see that the Auto-labeler selected Europe with 100% certainty in its answer.<figure class="image"><img src="https://cdn-assets.productfruits.com/df3288b5-b692-4081-96ba-03bdaf5afcb9"></figure>You will also now also see an Auto-label Report, located at the bottom left of the Overview page of your project. This report provides detailed analytics of the Auto-label answers in comparison to reviewer answers. See more about the report on the <a href="https://help.sysrev.com/en/article/understanding-the-auto-label-report">Understanding the Auto-label Report page</a>.&nbsp;You can also have the Auto-labeler prefill the labels in the Review tab. To learn more, visit our <a href="https://help.sysrev.com/en/article/using-prefill-review-answers-with-the-auto-labeler">Prefill label answers help page</a>.For a recommended process for testing and revising your prompt, check out our <a href="https://help.sysrev.com/en/article/suggested-workflow-for-testing-and-running-auto-labels-copy">Suggested Workflow for Testing and Running Auto-labels page</a>.&nbsp;Pro tip: For tips and tricks on optimizing your prompts, check out the <a href="https://help.sysrev.com/en/article/tips-for-optimizing-your-auto-label-prompts-copy">Tips for Optimizing your Auto-label Prompts page</a>.&nbsp;

<h2>Features &amp; Releases</h2>Project (text) Highlighter: The Project highlighter is located in Manage -&gt; Settings, below the Project setting box. Click the + Add highlighter button, give your highlighter a name (aka Title) and add terms in the Add keyword box, clicking the + button or enter on your keyboard after each term or phrase. Options include case sensitivity and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_expression">regular expressions</a> (which can be used to highlight terms or phrases based on a pattern, such as all numeric measures in microgram units). You can also use the color picker to choose custom colors. When choosing darker colors, the font of the highlighted text will automatically change to white to improve readability.&nbsp;For more information, check out <a href="https://help.sysrev.com/en/article/project-and-review-settings">this article</a> in the Sysrev Knowledgebase.&nbsp; &nbsp;<figure class="image"><img src="https://cdn-assets.productfruits.com/f1cca073-a9b5-4b66-a0a2-42417ac1990b"></figure>Zotero Import Translator: Sysrev has integrated the Zotero Translator for Import/Export file types. Moving forward, any file that is compatible with Zotero can be imported into Sysrev without loss of data. Learn more about the Zotero Translator <a href="https://www.zotero.org/support/dev/translators#:~:text=Import%20translators:%20can%20import%20item,arXiv%2C%20are%20also%20search%20translators.">here</a>.Gemini Auto-labeler data transfers: We have updated the way PDFs are transferred to and processed by the Gemini 2.5 Flash LLM. Previously, we would pre-process PDFs using Grobid to turn a PDF into text. This process was helpful to early models. Moving forward, we will perform no text pre-processing and send the full PDF to Gemini. This will increase data recall, by removing the possibility of text constraints, as well as providing images, tables and headers to Gemini.<h2>Bugs &amp; Defects</h2>Check new results: A defect was fixed whereby Sysrev was not properly checking parent projects for new articles that match a filter used as an import into a child project.&nbsp;Disabled article data: A defect was fixed whereby the data of/from disabled articles was still populating project widgets e.g. the User Answers histogram.&nbsp;Prefilled False Boolean : A defect was fixed whereby Sysrev was not properly prefilling Auto-labeler answers for human review when the Auto-labeler returned False for a boolean label.&nbsp;

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