Background and

Methods:

Enabling evidence-based healthcare will depend on the availability of high-quality, up-to-date clinical resources. Synthesis of multiple resources in a systematic review can summarize the effects of individual outcomes, with a certain degree of confidence, and provide numerical answers about the effectiveness of interventions. Filtering of searches is time-consuming and no single method fulfills the principal requirements of speed with accuracy. Automation of systematic reviews is driven by a necessity to expedite the availability of current best evidence for policy and clinical decision-making. Rayyan (rayyan.qcri.org) is a web and mobile app that aims to provide an end-to-end platform to expedite the creation of systematic reviews using text-mining, machine-learning, database, and software engineering techniques. It is built on top of a cloud-based multi-tier service-oriented elastic architecture. We will present the basic architecture of Rayyan, how users interact with the app both on the web and on mobile devices, and results from an ongoing survey.

Discussion and

Conclusion:

First announced at the Hyderabad Cochrane Colloquium in 2014, Rayyan has grown significantly both in terms of the diversity of its features and the size of its user base. Rayyan is now serving more than 900 users, conducting in excess of 1200 reviews, totalling more than 1 million citations. Countless testimonials from users, available through the website, highlight the ease of exploration of searches, the time saved, and simplicity of sharing and comparing inclusion/exclusion decisions. A recent survey showed that on average our users achieve a 50% time saving compared to using other means and technologies. The strongest feature of the app, identified and reported in user feedback, was its functionality, i.e. the clear and unambiguous way in which studies could be viewed in context together with the completed selections, and how the 'undecided' studies could be fed back into the system and that these were then highlighted as 'hint'. Rayyan is responsive and quintessentially intuitive in use, with significant potential to lighten the load of reviewers.