How I Screened Articles for My Review - And Why I'll Never Do It That Way Again

When I started my first (and so far only) review article, I had no idea what I was getting into with screening.

I was a medical student at the time. I had studies to manage, patients to see, exams to prepare for. And on top of all that, I decided to write a review article.

The actual science part was fine. I love science. I love the scientific method. But the screening process? That nearly broke me.

Copy. Paste. Realize You Forgot Something. Repeat.

We had to screen a lot of articles. So what did I do? I copied and pasted all the titles into a document. One by one. From PubMed. Into Google Docs. And I made sure to copy the link together with the title, so I would always have all the information about the article available.

But then I realized - I should have also copied the PubMed ID. And the authors. Because if you want to retrieve any information about the article, you have to click on the link and wait for it to load. Then you have to switch tabs. Open new tabs. Go back to your document. Find where you were.

Before you know it, your browser has tens of tabs open. Actually, they do become hundreds of tabs. You're constantly switching between PubMed and your document, waiting for pages to load, losing your place.

If this was for five or six articles, fine. But when you have to do this for a hundred articles, every time clicking and waiting and switching tabs, it becomes incredibly frustrating.

The Document Becomes a Mess

So you start copying more information. The title. The authors. The PubMed ID. The abstract. But now your document gets bigger and bigger, full of information you don't really need for screening.

And when you copy-paste everything together - the title with the authors and the abstract - you get too much information. It's messy. You want it neater, more organized. So you're forced to copy separate sections for each article, every single time.

You never know which approach is the best. You start doing one thing, then realize you should have done another thing. So you switch. Now your document has inconsistencies. Some articles have just titles. Some have full abstracts. Some have PubMed IDs. Some don't.

Your whole file becomes a mess. And it doesn't feel like you're doing real science at all. It feels like you're doing data entry.

Accept or Reject? Pick Your Formatting Hack.

Then I had to go through all these articles and decide: accept or reject.

But there were no buttons for this. I had to mark my decisions using formatting. But which formatting?

Honestly, I can't even remember exactly what I used. I think it was bold and not bold. Or maybe underline. Maybe bold and underline for the ones I would keep? Or was it strikethrough for reject?

I genuinely don't remember. And that's part of the problem.

Because here's the thing: strikethrough would be the most appropriate choice, right? A line through the rejected articles. But in Google Docs, strikethrough isn't readily available. There's no easy keyboard shortcut I could remember. The icon is hidden in a menu somewhere. It's not something commonly used.

So you use what's quickest. Command+B for bold. Command+U for underline. These are one keystroke away. You select the text and press the shortcut. Done.

But if you want to use colors? That's multiple clicks. Select the text. Click the color tool. Select the specific color you want. That's three steps instead of one shortcut.

And strikethrough? Maybe there's a shortcut, but I could never remember it. The toolbar icon is buried in a menu.

So you end up with some hacky system. Bold means... something. Underline means... something else. And after some time, if you look at your document again, you won't even remember what formatting meant accept and what meant reject.

It's messy. It's hacky. It feels off.

There Are 100 Better Ways. Each Requires Setup.

I'm sure there are a hundred more efficient ways of doing this. Spreadsheets. Color coding systems. Dedicated columns for each decision.

But every way requires setup. You need to think beforehand about how you're going to do it. You need to pick a system and stick with it consistently. If you want a perfect document with a perfect screening methodology where you can look at it after months and remember exactly what was accepted and rejected - you need to plan.

But if it's your first time? If you're uncertain about which formatting to use? You just use what's quickest. What's most readily available. And that leads to inconsistencies.

The Spirit of Science

Here's something that bothered me a lot: when you write a scientific publication, you usually do it on your own free time. You do it for free. You do it for humanity, basically. That's the spirit of science.

I'm not going to argue about whether doing science should be unpaid. That's a different debate.

But at least it shouldn't be this painful. You shouldn't have to spend hours copy-pasting and using different formatting tricks for including and excluding articles. If you're giving your time freely for the advancement of knowledge, the tools should at least make it bearable.

I'm a Physician. I Also Want to Relax.

I'm a physician now. Back then I was a medical student, and it was so hard because I had so much to study. I don't have time like maybe an academic researcher who doesn't have to deal with patients, who doesn't have to learn new information for their own specialty.

But it's not just about saving time for real science. It's not just about patients needing me.

It's also about self-respect. After a certain point, you just want to relax a little bit. You don't want to spend another hour copying and pasting and screening articles in the most painful way possible.

Writing a review should be intellectually challenging, not administratively exhausting. I want the hard parts to be the science. Not the data entry.

So I Fixed It

When I built LitRevs, this was one of the first things I fixed.

Screening now works with buttons. Accept or reject with one click. No formatting hacks. No uncertainty about what you've already done. The system tracks everything automatically.

All the article information is already there - the title, the authors, the abstract, the PubMed ID. You don't have to copy anything. You don't have to decide what to include in your document. It's all organized for you.

It sounds so simple. But if you've ever done screening the manual way, you know how much of a difference this makes.

If This Sounds Familiar

If you've ever spent hours copying and pasting from PubMed, or lost track of which articles you've already screened, or used bold and underline as a poor substitute for actual screening tools, or ended up with a messy document full of inconsistencies - you're not alone.

I built LitRevs to fix this exact problem. It started with my own frustration.