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Abstract
Background: A systematic review is a complex work process including a part of literature search, a part of first inclusion/exclusion by title and abstract, and a part of detailed appraisal. Especially the parts where two or more reviewers have to work independently are at risk to become an organisatorial chaos. Currently available tools help to organize the search and its results and to create reference lists (Reference Manager, Endnote) or parts of the report (RevMan). However, they do not solve the problem of double independent processing of the appraisal part by title and abstract. Objectives: Support of structurised transparent organisation and documentation during the review process with independent reviewers. Methods: Therefore, we created a tool in Access which: imports the MEDLINE search results into a working form; generates generic import with other formats; shows the results in the work form where get full text, just abstract or not qualified can be selected while reading, with optional comments; creates a list of details or a citation list in the background which is easy to export into Word format; enables the reviewers to work in an own database independently (the different databases with the results can be merged without loss into one final database, in which reports and citation lists are actualized automatically); archives all older searches; highlights search results where full text is already available in our repository. Results: A database which can be sent by e-mail to all participant reviewers (4 MB size). Conclusions: We now own a manageable tool doing the organisation of assessment automatically, so that we can focus on contents rather than on bureaucracy. The tool has open source to be expanded by further assessment details and will be made available on our website after further testing of stability.