Systematic Literature Review Flow Manager
A streamlined workspace to manage academic paper screening, criteria evaluation, and data extraction without the spreadsheet chaos.
Conducting a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) requires analyzing hundreds or thousands of scientific papers. Managing the traditional research funnel—removing duplicates, applying inclusion/exclusion criteria, screening abstracts, and extracting data—using standard spreadsheets is highly error-prone, hard to track, and difficult to collaborate on within a research lab.
SLR Flow is a dedicated tool designed to track the entire lifecycle of a systematic review. It provides a structured, step-by-step pipeline that ensures methodological rigor, prevents data loss, and makes it drastically easier to manage the paper pipeline for high-quality academic publications.
- 📋 Protocol Management: Define your Research Questions (RQs), search strings, and strict Inclusion/Exclusion Criteria (IC/EC) upfront.
- 📥 Centralized Import: Aggregate raw search results from major scientific databases (e.g., IEEE, ACM, Scopus, Web of Science).
- 🔍 Phase 1 - Abstract Screening: A distraction-free UI to quickly Accept/Reject papers based purely on their title and abstract, with mandatory criteria tagging for rejections.
- 📖 Phase 2 - Full-Text Review: Manage the deep-reading queue. Document exact reasons for exclusion to maintain traceability.
- 📊 Data Extraction: Structured forms to extract both quantitative and qualitative data required to answer your research questions.
- 📈 PRISMA Ready: Automatically tracks the flow of papers (identified, screened, included) to easily generate standard PRISMA flow diagrams.
- Backend: NestJS (Node.js framework)
- Language: TypeScript (100% strict type coverage)
- Database: (Add your DB here, e.g., PostgreSQL / Prisma ORM)
- Containerization: Docker & Docker Compose ready
Make sure you have Node.js (v20+) and Docker installed on your machine.
# 1. Clone the repository
git clone [https://github.com/YvesDeSa/slr-flow.git](https://github.com/YvesDeSa/slr-flow.git)
cd slr-flow
# 2. Install dependencies
npm install
# 3. Setup environment variables
cp .env.example .env
# 4. Start the database (if using Docker)
docker-compose up -d
# 5. Run database migrations
npm run db:migrate
# 6. Start the development server
npm run start:dev
This application enforces the standard academic methodology for literature reviews:
- Identification: Upload metadata records from scientific bases.
- Screening: Fast-pass review over Titles & Abstracts.
- Eligibility: Full-text analysis of accepted papers against IC/EC rules.
- Included: Final list of papers ready for the Data Extraction phase.
Contributions, issues, and feature requests are welcome!
Feel free to check the issues page.
- Fork the Project
- Create your Feature Branch (
git checkout -b feature/AmazingFeature) - Commit your Changes (
git commit -m 'feat: Add some AmazingFeature') - Push to the Branch (
git push origin feature/AmazingFeature) - Open a Pull Request
Created by Yves de Sá Barbosa.
This project is MIT licensed.