Create A Stage

Add a Stage

You can add a stage via the left-hand side nagivation bar in your SyRF project or by clicking “add stage” on the project overview page.

Once you have added a stage, you can include it in your project by changing the “Enable Stage” setting to active in the top left-hand corner of the stage page.

Stage With Screening

By adding screening to your stage, you can screen the studies you have uploaded to your SyRF project using the inclusion/exclusion criteria you entered when creating your project. Currently, as inclusion/exclusion criteria are defined at the project level, you can only screen according to one set of inclusion/exclusion criteria.

Stage With Annotation

A stage with annotation allows you to annotate data from your study, according to pre-defined questions in your systematic review protocol. SyRF has a question builder tool to allow you to design questions for your project.

Once you have designed all annotation questions, you should specify the stage at which you want to answer each question. You can do this before you start screening or after you have finished screening.

To add questions to your stage of interest go to the ‘Stages’ section of your project homepage and click ‘Enter Stage’. You will then need to click on ‘Stage Design’ to start editing the stage.

Data Extraction

To extract data from graphs in your systematic review studies, you will have to turn on data extraction in addition to annotation within your stage.

Screening and Annotating Within the Same Stage

If you want to carry out screening and annotation at the same time, you will also need to have these functionalities turned on (e.g. even if you have screened at a separate stage, you might want to have the functionality of being able to exclude a study at a later time when you have read the full-text).

You will then be able to select the questions that you want to be included in this stage by checking the box next to the relevant questions.

Annotation Question Selection

Project Administators can select which questions they have created in the Question Design settings and add them to each stage. Click the ‘Edit project questions’ button to move to the question design page.

If a stage includes annotation then project administrators can select which questions to add to that stage by going to the stage on the left hand side navigation tab then Settings. At the bottom of this stage is Annotation Question Selection where you can select the questions to include in that stage. Read more about adding questions to stages here.