Syras has some collaboration tools to allow you to set up a team and assign and manage review work. If you are using Syras yourself to simply screen or reduce a set of references, you may skip this section. Syras does not impose a particular workflow or protocol, but provides tools for you to construct your own. In this guide we present two examples, firstly how to set up a simple double screening and secondly how to divide a large corpus up and distribute the screening. Note you could in fact combine these two models and both divide the review and still double-screen each division.
How to invite a collaborator to perform a double-screening
As project administrator, with your project set up and articles imported, goto to the Project Dashboard and scroll down to the section entitled Collaborators
Under Add a collaborator, enter your collaborator’s email address into the field and click Add to Project. You will see a new row appear in the team table.
Next you need to assign an article set for them to review. In this case there is only one set. Open the “ALL ARTICLES” set and click the ASSIGN button. Tick the box next to the name/email of the collaborator.
Return to the Collaborators section, and you will see a SEND INVITE button in their row in the team table. Click this button to send them an invitation email.
You will now see the team table row says “Sent”. This will change to “Received” when they open and action the invitation.
Collaborator aspect – when the collaborator receives the invitation, they will need to login or register. See the Account Management Guide for more details.
Both yourself and your collaborator are now able to begin screening.
See the Screening Tools Guide for more details on how to perform the actual screening. Also see the Double Screening Guide for more details on the wider process of reviewing and managing the data, disagreements and exports.
How to divide the corpus and assign parts to two collaborators
In this example we have a large corpus of several thousand article references to screen. As project administrator, you have decided to get two research assistants to screen half each, to reduce the workload or speed up the task.
As project administrator, with your project set up and articles imported, goto to the Project Dashboard and scroll down to the section entitled Collaborators
Under Add a collaborator, enter your collaborator’s email address into the field and click Add to Project. Repeat for the second collaborator. You will see two new rows in the team table, both waiting for assigments.
Next you need to assign an article set each for them to review. In this case we would like to split the work into two sub-sets. Open the “ALL ARTICLES” set and click the CREATE SUBSET button.
In the pop-up dialogue, enter a friendly name for the split (this is an optional prefix, the full name for each sub-set will be generated). Select Randomised if you want to shuffle the order of the imported references. Enter 2 in the Number of sets field, and click GO.
Under the Article Sets section you will now see two more rows entitled “(your prefix) – Random 1of 2 of ALL ARTICLES”. They should have half the articles each. This name shows it used the random shuffling, is part one of two splits, and was sourced from the ALL ARTICLES set (as you can subdivide from any set). The timestamp is also shown, to prevent any confusion should you later modify your ALL ARTICLES set by importing more references (note any subsets would not be updated in that case).
Open the first subset, tick the box next to the name/email of the first collaborator.
Open the second subset, tick the box next to the name/email of the second collaborator.
Under the Collaborators section, you will now see the article sets assigned to each collaborator. You may now send their project invitations, by clicking each of the SEND INVITE buttons.
Both your collaborators are now able to begin screening. You will receive notifications when they accept their invites, after which you may wish to perform some basic training or introduction.
In this case, for completeness, you may wish to remove your own assigment to the ALL ARTICLES set. By default, Syras assigns you (administrator) to the first article set, to make it simpler to just get screening. However in this scenario, all the review work will be done in the two subsets, so for clarity you may wish to remove the default assignment. To do this OPEN the ALL ARTICLES set, click ASSIGN, and untick your own name. You and your collaborators will see it reflected in the team table, that you have no articles assigned.
Monitoring progress
The project administrator can view their team’s progress through screening in the team table. On the right, there is a ratio of progress, plus a link to view their screening summary page which includes a list of their “included” articles so far.
All collaborators can also see their own screening summary page (but no-one else’s).