Use cases
The same four stages cover very different jobs. What changes between them is which stage hurts — and that is usually a good guide to whether a tool will help you or just add a login.
Systematic reviews
The classic case, and the one where screening volume dominates: a search returns thousands of records and two reviewers have to read every title and abstract. Prioritised screening changes the order they arrive in rather than the standard applied to them, so the includes tend to surface early and the long tail of obvious excludes stops being the bottleneck. Dual review, custom exclude reasons and a PRISMA diagram are part of the workflow rather than a spreadsheet next to it.
Scoping and rapid reviews
Here the hard part is the front of the funnel — you do not yet know the right search terms, so the first search is wrong and you find that out slowly. Building the search from a question or a seed citation, expanding terms and snowballing outward from references shortens that loop.
Before you open a project at all, the free atlas on this site is a fast way to see who and what is already in an area: start from a topic and follow it to the researchers and papers behind it.
Living reviews
A review that has to stay current is not a one-off project, and treating it like one is what makes updates expensive. Keeping the search, the screening decisions and the extraction in one place means an update re-runs the search and screens only what is new, instead of reconstructing what the team decided last time from a folder of PDFs.
HEOR and regulatory evidence
When the output goes to a payer, a regulator or a journal, the process has to be as defensible as the conclusion. Extraction that stays attached to its source article, documented exclude reasons and exportable evidence tables mean the audit trail is a by-product of doing the work rather than something reassembled afterwards.
Teaching and multi-site teams
A shared workspace matters most when the team is not in one place or not equally practised: a browser is the only requirement, everybody sees the same records and the same progress, and nobody is emailing versions of a citation file around. That is also the case where a citation manager pressed into service as a screening tool costs the most, usually paid by whoever has to deduplicate and distribute the results.
Where to start
If your bottleneck is screening volume or keeping a review current, the trial will show you inside a day — see pricing and what ScholarIQ does. If you are still scoping, start free in the atlas.