Table 1

Per-scenario overview of potential pitfalls and how to prevent these when using ASReview in a systematic review

Potential scenarioPitfallRemedy
Only a small (ie, manually feasible*) number of articles (with possibly a high proportion relevant) available for screeningTime wasted by considering AI-related choices, software training and no time saved by using AIDo not use AI: conduct manual screening
Presence of duplicate articles in ASReviewUnequal weighing of labelled articles in AI-supported screeningApply deduplication methods before using AI
Reviewer’s own opinion, expertise or mistakes influence(s) AI algorithm on article selectionNot all relevant articles are included, potentially introducing selection biasReviewer training in title and abstract screening
Perform (partial) double screening and check inter-reviewer agreement
AI-supported screening is stopped before or a long time after all relevant articles are foundNot all relevant articles are included, potentially introducing selection bias, or time is wastedFormulate a data-driven stopping criterion (ie, number of consecutive irrelevant articles)
AI-related choices not (completely) describedIrreproducible results, leading to a low-quality systematic reviewDescribe and substantiate the choices that are made
Study selection is not transparentIrreproducible results (black box algorithm), leading to a low-quality systematic reviewPublish open data (ie, extracted file with all decisions)
  • *What is considered manually feasible is highly context-dependent (ie, the intended workload and/or reviewers available).

-