Dear Zoé,

You can indeed have multiple people screening items under Priority Screening, with the software automatically building a list of items to present to each reviewer. You can specify your chosen number of people and reconciliation mode.

The software will order the papers, so you see the most relevant ones first. After a certain point, the likelihood is you can safely stop screening - safe in the knowledge that the software has ordered the papers so that anything past this point is just confirming the software's "decision". (The software cannot guaranteed to be 100% accurate, so some discretion is required, but generally you will be able to see this point come... The software's progress can be monitored and graphed.)

You can carry out other operations within the software and then return to the Screening tab (once you have turned the feature on via the review settings in our Account Manager), but generally I would recommend following a "process" within your review - search, import, screen (usually on title & abstract, and then on full text for the items that made it through the first round of screening on title & abstract), extract data, etc.

Priority Screening is covered in our Manual (see https://eppi.ioe.ac.uk/cms/Default.aspx?tabid=2933 or https://eppi.ioe.ac.uk/CMS/Portals/35...er%20manual.pdf for the direct link). It is covered around page 74 onwards (https://eppi.ioe.ac.uk/CMS/Portals/35/ER4_8_0%20user%20manual.pdf#page=74).

Do let us know if you need any further information or assistance. We are happy to give specific suggestions for settings for a particular review, if given the review ID number (or name). I would recommend checking you have your settings correct before starting the process.

Kind regards,

EPPI Support
(EPPISupport@UCL.ac.uk)

Hello Zoé,

the key here is about the "Data entry mode" in which the chosen screening tool is configured. There are 2 possibilities: "Normal" which means that anyone's decision is immediately considered authoritative and made visible to everyone; and "Comparison" mode. In this latter case, what codes people tick will initially remain as "incomplete" coding and thus private to them.
In the Silverlight version, you change the data entry mode via right click on the root of your screening tool and "properties". In both versions, the "Normal" data entry is represented visually by the icon showing one person, the "Comparison" mode is represented by an icon with two people.

The additional facility of "auto reconcile" offered via the "priority screening" mechanism would automatically mark as "completed" (and thus public/authoritative) all the codings that satisfy the conditions as specified by the configuration in question (no auto completions, "safety first", at code level or at Include/Exclude level).

However, if you don't want to double code anything (one reference is to be screened by one reviewer), then what's needed is to configure the screening tool for "Normal" data entry (which I believe is your current situation). This means you won't be able to increase the "# of people screening each item" to more than 1 (in the "Screening" tab) and that the priority screening engine will feed references accordingly (only one person will screen a given reference). Moreover, whenever a reference will be screened, the decision will be recorded as "completed" (public and authoritative) and will thus be visible to all (all reviewers and accessible through all EPPI-Reviewer functions).

To monitor progress (by person and coding tool) you can use the "review statistics" tab in the Silverlight version (lower right corner). In the web version, the same information is visible in the "review home" tab, "Coding Progress" section (you can expand the details of each coding tool by clicking on the tool name).

I hope this helps,
Sergio