metRscreen

metRscreen is an R package providing a Shiny app for title and abstract screening in meta-analyses and systematic reviews. It presents each reference one at a time, highlights your keywords in multiple colours so relevant terms jump out of the abstract, and records an include/reject decision — with a reason — for every paper.

Screening is the slowest and most error-prone stage of a systematic review. Hundreds or thousands of abstracts have to be judged consistently against the same criteria, often across several sessions and sometimes several people. metRscreen keeps that process in one place: decisions are saved as you go, rejection reasons are chosen from a list you define rather than typed freehand, and the whole session state is restored when you reopen the app.

It works best with references exported as a .csv from Zotero, but should work with most references given in .csv format — be sure that your data matches the arguments in the app. It now also accepts the .RIS format from Zotero.

Title of MS        = "Title"
Authors of MS      = "Author"
Year of MS         = "Publication.Year"
Publishing Journal = "Publication.Title"
Abstract of MS     = "Abstract"
Keywords of MS     = "Manual.Tags"

Features

• One paper at a time. Title, authors, year, journal, abstract, and keywords, with components you can show or hide to suit your screening style.
• Multi-colour keyword highlighting. Pre-load terms per colour so inclusion and exclusion signals are visually distinct at a glance.
• Custom rejection reasons. Define your own list and select several at once, so exclusions are auditable rather than a single undifferentiated "no".
• Resumable sessions. An .rds file records your decisions and is reloaded automatically next time, returning the app to exactly the state you left it in.
• Zotero .csv and .RIS support. Export straight from your reference manager.
• Wildcards in keywords. parent* matches parent, parental, parenting.
• Runs locally. Your reference library never leaves your machine.

Installation

metRscreen is not on CRAN, but you can install the development version from GitHub using the devtools package:

install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("EIvimeyCook/metRscreen")
library(metRscreen)

Usage

The only function is metRscreen(). The most important argument is screen.file. This can be used in conjunction with the here::here() package to enable relative pathing.

library(metRscreen)
metRscreen(screen.file = "~/Desktop/Example.csv")

Arguments

Argument	Purpose
screen.file	Path to your .csv or .RIS of references
reject.list	Character vector of your own rejection reasons
keywords	Named list of keyword vectors, one element per highlight colour

You can give specific rejection reasons as a vector with reject.list = c(), and select multiple rejection reasons together. You can also specify preloaded keywords using the keywords argument — note that to specify multiple keywords, include a "," in addition to the former keyword in the sequence (e.g. "old,", "young").

metRscreen(
  screen.file = "~/Desktop/Examples.csv",
  reject.list = c("no control", "wrong study system"),
  keywords    = list(green = c("old,", "young"), red = c("parent*"))
)

Resuming a screening session

The .rds file that's produced allows for reloading of previous screening decisions. This will be automatically reloaded the next instance metRscreen is run and will return screening to the same state — the same reject list, hidden or showing paper components, and any previous screening decisions.

Coming soon

Adding a new argument which allows for non-simultaneous collaborative screening (collab.names = c()).

Bug reports and contributions

Please file issues and feature requests at https://github.com/EIvimeyCook/metRscreen/issues. Pull requests are welcome.

Related tools

• shinyDigitise — extract data from published figures once screening is done
• DCQC — data and code quality control checklist for editors and reviewers
• READMEBuilder — document the resulting project for archiving

Citation

If metRscreen helps with your work, please cite it:

Ivimey-Cook, E. R. (2026). metRscreen: Screening for meta-analysis and systematic reviews in R. R package. https://github.com/EIvimeyCook/metRscreen

A machine-readable CITATION.cff is included, so GitHub's "Cite this repository" button gives formatted APA and BibTeX.

License

Released under the MIT License.

AI Declaration

Claude Sonnet 4.6 was used in the latter stages of development.