Frequently Asked Questions
Plans and pricing
Is ActiveSLR really free?
Yes. All three plans - Explorer, Scholar, and Corporate - are completely free. There are no paid tiers or usage fees.
What is the difference between the Explorer and Scholar plans?
The Explorer plan is for individual researchers and supports up to 2 projects and 3 users per project. The Scholar plan is for academic institutions and supports unlimited projects and users. Both are free; the difference is team size and the number of projects you can run simultaneously.
Do I need to verify my institution to use the Scholar plan?
No. During sign-up for the Scholar plan, you provide your institution or university name, but no document verification is required. Corporate plan accounts require document verification because they are for commercial organizations.
Can I upgrade from Explorer to Scholar later?
Yes. Contact the ActiveSLR team and they will upgrade your account. Your existing projects and data are preserved during the plan change.
Roles and permissions
What is the difference between an organization role and a project role?
An organization role controls what you can do across the whole organization - such as inviting members or creating projects. A project role controls what you can do within a specific project - such as screening studies or uploading files. Every user has both.
Can a user have different roles in different projects?
Yes. A user can be a Screener in one project and a Lead Reviewer in another. Project roles are assigned per-project and are independent of each other.
Who can create and edit roles?
Any organization member with the addRole permission can create and edit both organization roles and project roles.
Collaboration
How does the invitation flow work?
You send an invitation by entering the invitee's email address in Organization Settings → Members → Invite Member. They receive an email with a unique link. Clicking the link lets them accept (which creates or links their account and adds them to your organization) or decline.
What happens if an invited user does not have an ActiveSLR account?
They will be prompted to create an account as part of the invitation acceptance flow. The sign-up and invitation acceptance are combined into a single flow for new users.
Can I resend or cancel an invitation?
Yes. Pending invitations appear in the Pending Invitations list on the Members tab. You can resend (to re-send the invitation email) or cancel (to invalidate the invitation link) from there.
Files and deduplication
Which file formats does ActiveSLR support?
ActiveSLR supports RIS (.ris) and NBIB (.nbib) files. These are the standard citation export formats used by PubMed, Scopus, Web of Science, Embase, and other major databases. See Supported file formats for details.
How accurate is deduplication?
ActiveSLR uses the Medusa algorithm, which combines multiple similarity signals (title, authors, DOI, journal, year) to identify duplicates. For typical systematic review datasets, precision is very high for true duplicates. Possible duplicates (near-matches) are surfaced for manual review rather than automatically removed.
Can I undo deduplication?
Individual duplicate decisions (confirming or discarding a possible duplicate) can be reviewed from the managing discarded records view. The deduplication run itself cannot be undone, but no study records are permanently deleted - discarded duplicates can be restored.
Screening
Can I cite ActiveSLR in my systematic review?
Yes. ActiveSLR is a citable platform. Refer to the citation guidance available on the ActiveSLR website or contact the team for the current recommended citation format.
Can two reviewers screen the same studies?
Yes. Create a project with double-screening enabled. Both reviewers independently screen the same study pool. Disagreements are resolved during the reconciliation phase.
AI features
Does AI make screening decisions automatically?
No. AI suggestions are advisory only. You must explicitly click Include or Exclude for each study. The AI surfaces a suggestion and confidence level to inform your decision, but the decision itself is always yours.
Which PDFs work best for PICO extraction?
High-quality born-digital PDFs (downloaded directly from publisher websites) produce the best PICO extraction results. Scanned PDFs processed through OCR have lower text accuracy, which can reduce extraction quality.