ReviewAid vs SyRF
ReviewAid
reviewaid.github.ioSyRF
syrf.org.ukSide by side
| Figure | ReviewAid | SyRF |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Windows | Yes | — |
| macOS | Yes | — |
| Linux | Yes | — |
| Self-hosted | Yes | — |
| Plans published | 1 | 1 |
| Spec score · Systematic Review Software | 8.3 (#5) | 7.1 (#26) |
| Intended users | The maker says ReviewAid was built to assist researchers, especially those involved in evidence synthesis. | SyRF is intended for researchers conducting systematic reviews and meta-analyses of preclinical studies. |
| Purpose | ReviewAid is an open-source AI tool for full-text screening and data extraction in systematic reviews. | SyRF supports evidence synthesis and systematic reviews of preclinical research, including storing extracted data and providing educational resources and guidance. |
| Support | The maker pages opened did not state a support channel. | The guide directs users to contact the SyRF Help Desk for help with manual screening-disagreement reconciliation. |
Plans
In their own words
ReviewAid
ReviewAid is a free, open-source AI tool for full-text screening and data extraction in systematic reviews. Researchers can provide PICO inclusion and exclusion criteria for classifying papers, then define which fields they want extracted. The tool reports confidence scores and marks low-confidence results for manual review. Downloads are available as CSV, XLSX, or DOCX. ReviewAid supports OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepSeek, Cohere, Z.ai, and local Ollama. When a cloud provider is selected, paper text is sent to that provider for the run; with Ollama, inference takes place on the local machine and the text remains there. The maker says API keys are not stored. Users can work in a browser-based Streamlit app or install locally with Python 3.12 or later and Streamlit on Windows, macOS, or Linux. Hosted sessions may take about 30 seconds to initialize. Submission guidance caps full-text screening at 10 articles and extraction at 20 per submission. ReviewAid is licensed under Apache 2.0 and is described as a supplementary reviewer, not a substitute for manual screening or extraction.
SyRF
SyRF is a web platform for researchers conducting systematic reviews and meta-analyses of preclinical studies. It supports collaborative projects, configurable workflows, study screening, annotation, data extraction, and educational guidance. By default, two reviewers assess studies against inclusion and exclusion criteria, with a third reviewer handling disagreements. Student projects can enable single screening, though the guide does not recommend it for journal-bound reviews. Administrators create annotation questions and assign them to workflow stages; graph extraction requires data extraction and annotation together. Studies and associated data, including quantitative results for analysis in R or SAS, can be downloaded. References must be deduplicated and supplied as EndNote Desktop XML or CSV. Full-text PDFs may be linked, but users provide the files separately for SyRF staff to process and store. Projects can be public or private, and each project currently supports one criteria set. SyRF is free online, with a minimum feature set under continuous development.