Bulk Screening
Bulk screening lets you select multiple studies from a list and apply a single decision to all of them at once. It is useful when you have a large number of studies that are clearly out of scope and want to exclude them without opening each one individually.
When to use bulk screening
Use bulk screening when:
- You can confidently identify a group of studies as excludable from their titles alone (for example, all studies from a particular journal or all studies with a clearly irrelevant keyword in the title)
- You want to quickly exclude a large batch of studies that share a common, obvious exclusion reason
- You are doing a triage pass before more careful individual screening
Bulk screening trades speed for precision. Because you are making decisions on multiple studies without reading each abstract, only use it when you are confident in your criteria. Erroneous bulk exclusions can remove relevant studies from your review.
Switching to bulk mode
By default, the screening interface opens in individual study mode. To switch to bulk mode:
- Open Title/Abstract Screening from the project sidebar.
- Click the List view or Bulk toggle at the top of the screening interface.
The view changes from a single study card to a table listing all unscreened studies.
Making decisions in bulk
Select studies
Check the checkboxes next to the studies you want to screen. You can use the header checkbox to select all studies on the current page.
Choose a decision
With studies selected, click Include or Exclude in the bulk action toolbar at the top or bottom of the list.
Select an exclusion reason (if excluding)
If you clicked Exclude, a dropdown appears prompting you to select an exclusion reason. This reason is applied to all selected studies.
Confirm
The selected studies are marked with your decision and removed from the unscreened list.
Sorting and filtering the list
The list view supports sorting by title, author, year, and source. You can also filter by keyword to surface a specific subset of studies. This makes it easier to identify groups for bulk exclusion - for example, filter by a year range or by a term that appears in out-of-scope titles.
A common bulk screening workflow: filter the list by a term you know is irrelevant to your review question, select all matching results, and exclude them in one action. Then clear the filter and continue with individual screening for the remaining studies.
Returning to individual mode
You can switch back to the individual study card view at any time using the same toggle. Studies already decided in bulk mode appear in the Screened tab and can be reviewed or changed individually if needed.