Colandr vs Universal SLR Assistant

Colandr is a free web platform for evidence reviews and other document reviews and syntheses. Machine learning ranks citations by relevance to help screen titles and abstracts, while natural language processing classifies included documents into user-defined categories and assists full-text data extraction. Reviewers retain the final inclusion, exclusion, and classification decisions, and teams can collaborate and cross-check work. Citation files can be imported in TXT, RIS, or BIB formats, with a 40 MB limit per import, and screening decisions and extracted data can be exported as CSV. Colandr does not connect directly to citation databases; users export citations elsewhere, although the platform can help create Boolean search strings. Full-text papers must be found and imported individually, with no mass-upload feature. Relevance rankings update after every 10 screened citations, and metadata suggestions begin after 50 hand-coded extractions. Colandr describes itself as open-source and open-access.

Universal SLR Assistant supports systematic and scoping reviews with AI-assisted screening, extraction, and reproducible outputs. It provides a desktop interface and a browser-based local Web App, and imports RIS, BibTeX, CSV, and plain-text references, including exports from PubMed, Scopus, and Web of Science. Its workflow covers abstract screening, full-text PDF processing, structured extraction, and export; likely duplicates are identified by DOI and fuzzy title matching. Workspace mode stores references, PDF metadata, review items, decisions, and audit events in a local SQLite workspace, separating AI suggestions from human decisions. Exports can include decision files and logs, exclusion reasons, PRISMA-ready counts, a methods disclosure draft, and a manifest. The project supports a range of cloud and local AI providers. Cloud providers receive submitted paper text, while Ollama or another local endpoint can keep it on the user's computer or local network. AI results are assistance only: people must verify them and make final review and reporting decisions. The software is free under the MIT License; cloud AI provider API fees may apply.