Rayyan’s Data Extraction stage brings data collection directly into the heart of your systematic review workflow, eliminating the need to juggle external spreadsheets, file folders, or reference managers. You can seamlessly move from screening to extraction without ever leaving the platform, ensuring all article IDs, labels, and metadata remain intact. This keeps your project integrated, organized, and fully audit-ready.
How to Get Started with Data Extraction in Rayyan
Articles marked as “Included” or “Maybe” or carrying specific labels can be added with a click, and if a PDF isn’t yet attached, you can upload it right at the extraction stage. If you have already performed full text screening in Rayyan and have attached all of your full texts, there is no additional effort required.
Building Extraction Tables and Forms
At the core of this feature is a flexible, customizable extraction form builder. Researchers can create logical sections to group related questions, choose between free-text or numeric fields, pre-label data columns for analysis-ready exports, and mark essential fields as required to avoid incomplete entries. The form can be refined at any point without losing previously entered data, meaning your workflow adapts as your project evolves—without the dreaded “version chaos” of circulating spreadsheets.
Manually Extracting Data from PDFs
Working with the built-in PDF viewer means there’s no more toggling between programs or browser tabs. You can open a study’s PDF right beside the extraction form, zoom in on tables, rotate scanned pages, and even compare multiple PDFs in a split view. This tight integration preserves your focus and speeds up the extraction process by keeping both the source and the entry form in one place.
Blinded Data Extraction and Collaboration
Collaboration has also been carefully thought out. Blinding allows each reviewer to work independently, preserving methodological rigor. When the review owner unblinds, Rayyan displays side-by-side comparisons to highlight differences between reviewers’ entries. Conflicts can be resolved by accepting one answer, merging notes, or entering a new response. This structured approach makes conflict resolution faster, more transparent, and less error-prone.
Monitoring Data Extraction Progress and Reporting Status
Progress tracking is built in, with filters that show articles by extraction status—Not Started, Uncompleted,or Completed—and by the number of reviewers who have finished each one. You can also see at a glance where disagreements remain, so bottlenecks are easy to spot and address.
When your extraction work is complete, exporting is effortless. A single click generates a clean, structured CSV with columns matching your form design, ready for use in analysis tools like R, RevMan, or Excel. A link to the file is sent via email and can be downloaded from your Review Chat, ensuring every team member can access the same, consistent dataset without additional formatting or cleanup.
Rayyan Provides a Consolidated End to End Systematic Review Workflow
For researchers, this means a fully consolidated, secure, and auditable environment for both screening and data collection. By keeping every stage of the systematic review process within one platform, Rayyan reduces the risk of errors, increases transparency, and supports full traceability back to original screening decisions and source PDFs. Teams aiming to meet PRISMA standards and produce high-quality, reproducible evidence syntheses without the inefficiencies of a fragmented workflow trust Rayyan for their systematic literature reviews.
For further reading, visit this Help Center article for a step-by-step guide to Data Extraction in Rayyan.
