Rayyan vs SWIFT-Review

Rayyan is a platform for teams carrying out systematic evidence reviews, with workflows intended to be transparent, auditable, and reproducible. Its process spans reference import, collaboration, deduplication, title and abstract screening, full-text screening, data extraction, risk-of-bias assessment, and reporting. ResearchPilot AI Reviewer screens articles against criteria set by the user and gives decisions with reasoning notes. The Analyzer suggests inclusion or exclusion with justification, while the researcher retains final decision-making. ResearchPilot can also extract answers to custom questions from PDFs and metadata, highlight relevant passages, and let users inspect the answers. References are imported from exported files rather than a direct database connection. The API offers programmatic access to reviews, references, decisions, and metadata, plus workflow automation and external integrations. Rayyan is available on Android, iOS, web, and through an API. The Free plan allows three active reviews and two free reviewers; paid options start at $8.33 a month per seat, billed annually. Free mobile access is limited; Essential and higher provide unlimited mobile access.

SWIFT-Review is a desktop workbench for formulating systematic reviews and prioritizing literature for screening. Statistical text mining and machine learning identify over-represented topics and rank documents for manual review. Users can search, categorize, prioritize, visualize, and extract information from large citation sets. The ranking workflow requires an initial training seed, and the software does not estimate how many relevant articles remain above a threshold. It can import PubMed IDs or XML, RIS files, and previously saved SWIFT Text-mining Project files; PMID imports retrieve citation data through NLM’s Entrez e-Utilities interface. Exports include Excel, RIS, and plain tab-delimited text. The free desktop software is available for Windows and Mac, with downloads through Sciome’s applications portal after signing in or creating a free account. Installation requires administrative access. The guide lists 64-bit Windows 7, 8, or 10 and 64-bit Mac OS X 10.8 or later, and recommends 8 GB RAM; very large projects may need more. Minor updates usually happen automatically, while major updates may require administrator privileges.