Silvi 101

1. Getting started

On Silvi's homepage, click on "Get started."

Enter your name and email and choose a password to sign up for free.

Once you've signed up, your Silvi account would look something like this.

You will have a "Demo Asthma Review."

2. Creating a Project

To create a project, click on "Create new project" button in the top-right corner.

Then type in the name of your project and click on "Create project."

The name of your project is not fixed. You can change it later if you want to.

3. Importing Studies

Once you've created a project, you'd want to import studies into it.

Go to PubMed and run a search. Filter search results and then click on "Advanced" under the search bar.

Scroll down a little and copy the search string from PubMed.

Go to Silvi and click on "Import Studies."

Select "Scientific database" and then "PubMed."

Click "Next" and paste the search string you copied from PubMed.

Click "Save" and then "Fetch" in the bottom-right corner.

Silvi will automatically retrieve all the studies from PubMed and import them into your project.

Click on "Start screening" to begin your screening process.

4. Screening Studies

While screening, Silvi will show you the title of a given paper and its abstract. You can read both the title and the abstract to decide if you would like to include a given study or not.

To include a study, simply click on the green check mark at the bottom and the study will be included.

To exclude studies, a convenient way is to type in the search bar a few key words, e.g. "systematic review."

Silvi will show you all the studies contaning those key words.

Select the studies by using Ctrl + mouse click or Shift + Down Arrow key.

Then click on red button at the bottom to exclude the selected studies.

5. Full Text Screening and Data Extraction

After screening the titles and abstracts of studies, you will move to the full text phase.

To go to the full text phase, click on the "Go to Full Text" button in the left taskbar.

Silvi will automatically retrieve full texts of open access papers for you. For papers behind paywalls, you will have to download them using your university's library.

To extract data from a study, highlight a data point and Silvi will show you a Tags menu. Choose a title for your tag and select the type of your tag. You can create three types of tags: Text, Numerical, and Category.

Then press Enter/Return and Silvi will create a tag and attach it to the selected data point.

6. Table of Extracted Data

Once you are done with extracting data, click on the "Go to Analysis" button in the left taskbar.

Silvi will show you all the extracted data in the form of a neatly organized table.

You can also download the table.