Collaborative Literature Reviews

CoLRev is an open-source environment for collaborative literature reviews. It integrates with differerent synthesis tools, takes care of the data, and facilitates Git-based collaboration.

To accomplish these goals, CoLRev advances the design of review technology at the intersection of methods, design, cognition, and community building. The following features stand out:

• An open and extensible environment based on data and process standards

• Builds on git and its transparent collaboration model for the entire literature review process

• Offers a self-explanatory, fault-tolerant, and configurable user workflow

• Operates a model for data quality, content curation, and reuse

• Provides validate and undo operations

• Enables typological and methodological pluralism throughout the process

A complete example run of CoLRev can be seen below:

Please consult the statements of development status. A brief overview presented at ESMARConf2023 is available on YouTube.

Getting started

After installing git and docker (Docker is optional but recommended):

# Create and activate a python virtual environment
python -m venv ~/venv-colrev && source ~/venv-colrev/bin/activate

# Install CoLRev and all CoLRev related packages ...
pip install colrev && colrev install all_internal_packages

# ... and start with the main command
colrev status

The CoLRev environment supports the whole literature review process:

Completing a literature review should be as simple as running the following commands:

# Formulate the objectives, initialize the project, specify the review type
colrev init

# Store search results in the data/search directory
# Load, prepare, and deduplicate the metadata reocrds
colrev retrieve

# Conduct a prescreen
colrev prescreen

# Get and prepare the PDFs
colrev pdfs

# Conduct a screen based on PDFs
colrev screen

# Complete the forms of data analysis and synthesis, as specified in the settings
colrev data

Further information is provided in the documentation. The manual explains how to use the functionality of CoLRev when conducting a literature review. It covers the user workflow, the processing operations, as well as collaboration and curation. It does not explain the design and architecture of CoLRev, which are covered in the colrev framework and the API reference. Our goal is to provide a manual that is self-contained. Yet, it can help to be familiar with the basics of git - for example, by catching up with one of the interactive and free tutorials available online (tutorial).

The manual is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License and endorses the Code of Conduct for contributions.