SWIFT-Active Screener Knowledge Base

SWIFT-Active Screener is a web-based, collaborative systematic review software application. It is intended to be used during the document screening phase of systematic review and scoping activities. SWIFT-Active Screener is designed to reduce the overall screening burden for a systematic review.

SWIFT is an acronym for “Sciome Workbench for Interactive computer-Facilitated Text-mining.”

• Active Learning. Behind the scenes, Active Screener uses state-of-the-art statistical models designed to save screeners time and effort by automatically prioritizing articles as they are reviewed, incorporating user feedback to push the most relevant articles to the top of the list.
• It’s user-friendly. You can quickly and easily create screening projects, including data extraction questions to fit most any study design, without having to watch hours of tutorial videos or read a lengthy user manual.
• Real-time team collaboration. Active Screener allows teams to collaborate using a web-based interface which will enable your group to perform a systematic review anywhere, anytime. This flexibility allows for easy progress sharing and makes team communication easier to manage.
• Easy view of project progress. Active Screener’s project management tools make it easy to view your team’s progress while your systematic review is underway.
• Conflict resolution. Active Screener tracks screening conflicts and allows you to resolve them quickly and efficiently so that you can complete your review without delay.
• Data integration. Active Screener integrates with the systematic review tools that you already use. It accepts imports from many of the most popular bibliographic databases and reference curation platforms, including EndNote, Mendeley, Zotaro, PubMed, and SWIFT-Review. Results from screening activities in Active Screener can also be exported in standard data formats compatible with a wide range of applications, including EndNote, Mendeley, Zotaro, PubMed, HAWC and Excel.

During screening, as articles are included or excluded, an underlying statistical model automatically computes which of the remaining unscreened documents are most likely to be relevant. This “Active Learning” model is continuously updated during screening, improving its performance with each article reviewed. Meanwhile, a separate statistical model estimates the number of relevant articles remaining in the unscreened document list. The combination of the two models allows users to screen relevant documents sooner and provides them with accurate feedback about their progress. As a result, the majority of relevant articles can be discovered after reviewing only a fraction of the total number of abstracts, which can result in significant time and cost savings, particularly for large projects.

SWIFT-Active Screener allows you to accomplish your review in a much more efficient manner by getting you the majority of relevant articles after screening only a fraction of the total articles. The amount of time saved will vary, depending on your specific project, but on average, users can save in excess of 50% of screening effort normally required.

SWIFT-Review and SWIFT Active Screener are separate software products, but both are used in the systematic review process. SWIFT-Review provides numerous tools to assist with problem formulation and literature prioritization. You can use SWIFT-Review to search, categorize, and prioritize large (or small) bodies of literature in an interactive manner. SWIFT-Review utilizes newly developed statistical text mining and machine learning methods that allow users to uncover over-represented topics within the literature corpus and to rank order documents for manual screening.

There is some overlap between the two tools, in that both perform literature prioritization. The key differences between the two software products are:

• SWIFT-Review is dependent on the availability of an initial training seed; Active-Screener can work with or without an initial training seed.
• SWIFT-Review uses ‘traditional’ machine learning to and builds its ranking model only once; Active-Screener builds its model iteratively, in response to user interaction, such that the model continually improves as references are screened.
• SWIFT-Review provides only a ranking of the documents but no feedback on how many relevant articles are available above any given threshold; Active-Screener provides a real-time estimate of document recall so that you can know when to stop screening.
• SWIFT-Review is a desktop application that runs on both Windows and Mac; Active-Screener is web-based software designed specifically for multi-user document screening.

To obtain your free license for SWIFT Review, simply browse to the Sciome Software web page to login and/or create your SWIFT-Review account.  Once you have logged in, you will find links to download the Windows and Mac installation software which you can use to set up SWIFT-Review on your computer.

No. While some users use both SWIFT-Review and SWIFT-Active Screener, you do not need to use SWIFT-Review before using SWIFT-Active Screener, and you can use each software application independently.

For pricing information about SWIFT-Active Screener, contact swift-activescreener@sciome.com.

A variety of government, academic, and industry groups currently use SWIFT-Active Screener, including:

• National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS)
• United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)
• The Endocrine Disruption Exchange (TEDX)
• John Hopkins Evidence-Based Toxicology Collaborative (EBTC)
• United States Department of Agriculture (USDA)

You do not need to install any software to use SWIFT-Active Screener. You simply need access to the internet to be able to access and use SWIFT-Active Screener. To access SWIFT-Active Screener, simply point your web browser to: https://swift.sciome.com/activescreener.

The recommended web browser for SWIFT-Active Screener is Google Chrome. When using other web browsers (e.g., Internet Explorer (IE), Safari, Firefox), there may be issues with specific presentation settings displaying correctly.

From the SWIFT-Active Screener Login page (https://swift.sciome.com/activescreener), click “Sign up.”

If you would like to change your password, you can do so from this link: https://user.sciome.com/login.

When you are in SWIFT-Active Screener, you will see the following six icons located next to the Project Name.

The first icon (magnifying glass with a plus sign) is the “Screen References” menu option. From here, you can do title only screening or launch detailed screening on one of the references displayed.

The second icon (pie chart) is the “Summary” menu option. This takes you to a page which allows you to track screening progress in the review and provides an estimate of the screening work remaining to be done.

The third icon (sheets of paper) is the “Manage References” menu option. This takes you to a page which allows you to view all the references in your project, view the screening history for those references, export data, and manage conflicts between screeners.

The fourth icon (graph) is the “Project Reports” menu option. This takes you to a page that lists the reports that are available (i.e., Conflict Report, Question/Answer Report, Screening Time Report, and Screening Summary Report).

The fifth icon (video camera) is the “Tutorial Videos” menu option. This takes you to a page where you may watch brief tutorial videos by topic area.

The sixth icon (looks like a gear) is the “Edit the Review” menu option. This takes you to the project settings window where you can edit the review questions, add reviewers and set up screening criteria.