ReLiS : a tool for conducting Systematic Review

Systematic review is a technique used to search for evidence in scientific literature that is conducted in a formal manner, following a well-defined process, according to a previously elaborated protocol. Conducting a systematic reviews involves many steps over a long period of time, and is often laborious and repetitive. This is why we have created ReLiS which provides essential software support to reviewers in conducting high quality systematic reviews. With ReLiS, you can planning, conducting, and reporting your review.

ReLiS stands for Revue Litteraire Systématique which is French for Systematic Literature Reviews Relis literally translates to “reread”.

What can you do in ReLiS?

  • Plan the review

    ReLiS features a domain-specific language to define a protocol that will guide the process of conducting the review. That protocol will help to generate a project tailored to the needs of the review. ReLiS supports an iterative process: you can revise the protocol and add more articles at any time.

  • Import articles

    ReLiS allows you to add references manually or import a list of them from CSV, BibTeX or EndNote files. The content of the article is available if the URL or DOI is provided.

  • Screen articles

    Each article can be assigned automatically or manually to a number of reviewers. Reviewers screen the corpus of articles by deciding which article to include and which one to exclude from the review. ReLiS brings invaluable assistance to conflicts between reviewers decisions, resolution of conflict, and many statistics on the screening process.

  • Assess quality

    Reviewers can assess the quality of the selected articles in the corpus using a questionnaire customized for the review. There are also several ways of assessing the quality of the review itself.

  • Extract relevant data

    Reviewers can extract the relevant data from each article according to categories and a classification scheme customized for each review. The data extraction form can be modified at any time incrementally.

  • Export results

    All extracted data are automatically synthesized in tables and charts, ready to be exported in your favorite tool for further analysis.

More about ReLiS

Read this article about ReLiS, which you can cite via:

B. Bigendako. and E. Syriani. Modeling a Tool for Conducting Systematic Reviews Iteratively. Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Model-Driven Engineering and Software Development. SCITEPRESS, pp. 552–559. (2018)

For more detailed information on ReLiS, you can read the thesis of Brice Bigendako (in French).

The team

ReLiS is developed and maintained by the software engineering lab GEODES in the department of computer science and operations research at the University of Montreal. Under the supervision of Prof. Eugene Syriani, the development is mainly supported by the students of the lab.

The open source code is available on GitHub.

If you have any questions, you can reach us at relis@iro.umontreal.ca.