Reducing Workload of Systematic Review Searching and Screening Processes

Systematic reviews, in particular medical systematic reviews, are time consuming and costly to produce. The largest contributing factors to the time and monetary costs are the searching (including the formulation of queries) and screening processes. These initial processes involve researchers reading the abstracts of thousands and sometimes hundreds of thousands of research articles to determine if the retrieved articles should be included or excluded from the systematic review. This research explores automatic methodologies to reduce the workload relating to the searching and screening processes.