DistillerSR: Literature Review Software

Smarter Reviews: Trusted Evidence

Securely automate every stage of your literature review to produce
evidence-based research faster, more accurately, and more

transparently at scale.

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Software Built for Every Stage of a Literature Review

DistillerSR automates the management of literature collection, screening, and assessment using AI and intelligent workflows. From a systematic literature review to a rapid review to a living review, DistillerSR makes any project simpler to manage and configure to produce transparent, audit-ready, and compliant results.

Literature Review Lifecycle, DistillerSR

Search more efficiently with DistillerSR’s integrations with data providers, such as PubMed, automatic review updates, and AI-powered duplicate detection and removal.

Search Screen Shot, DistillerSR

Search more efficiently with DistillerSR’s integrations with data providers, such as PubMed, automatic review updates, and AI-powered duplicate detection and removal.

Search Screen Shot, DistillerSR

PubMed
Integration

Search and import references from PubMed from within DistillerSR’s literature review software.

Automatic
Review Updates

Automatically import newly published references, always keeping literature reviews up-to-date with DistillerSR LitConnect.

Duplicate
Detection

Detect and remove duplicate citations preventing skew and bias caused by studies included more than once.

Faster, More Effective Reference Screening

Reduce your screening burden by 60% with DistillerSR. Start working on later stages of your review sooner by finding relevant references faster and addressing conflicts more easily.

Screening Screen Shot. DistillerSR
Reduce your screening burden by 60% with DistillerSR. Start working on later stages of your review sooner and more accurately by finding relevant references faster and addressing conflicts more easily.
Screening Screen Shot. DistillerSR

AI-Powered
Screening

Find references faster using AI to continuously reorder references based on relevance, and to pre-screen records with the help of DistillerSR AI Classifiers software module.

Conflict
Resolution

Automatically identifies conflicts and disagreements between literature reviewers for easy resolution.

AI Quality
Check

Increase the thoroughness of your literature review by having AI double-check your exclusion decisions and validate your categorization of records with the help of DistillerSR AI Classifiers software module.

DistillerSR AI helps reduce the screening burden by over 75%, meaning our team can focus on critical appraisal much sooner.
Maureen Dobbins, Scientific Director, NCCMT

Cost-Effective Access to Full-Text Documents

Ensure your literature review is always up-to-date with DistillerSR’s direct connections to full-text data sources, all the while lowering overall subscription costs.

DistillerSR Full Text Retrieval Screenshot

Ensure your review is always up-to-date with DistillerSR’s direct connections to full-text data sources, all the while lowering overall subscription costs.

DistillerSR Full Text Retrieval Screenshot

Open Access
Integrations

Automatically search for and upload full-text documents from PMC, and link directly to source material through DOI.org.

Copyright Compliant
Bulk Search

Retrieve full-text articles for the lowest possible cost through Article Galaxy.

Ad-Hoc Document
Retrieval

Leverage existing RightFind and Article Galaxy subscriptions, the open access Unpaywall plugin, and internal libraries to access copyright compliant documents.

Simple Yet Powerful Data-Extraction

Simplify data extraction through templates and configurable forms. Extract data easily with in-form validations and calculations, and easily capture repeating, complex data sets.

DistillerSR Data Extraction Screenshot

Simplify data extraction through templates and configurable forms. Extract data easily with in-form validations and calculations, and easily capture repeating, complex data sets.

DistillerSR Data Extraction Screenshot

Cross-Review,
Data Reuse

Prevent duplication of effort across your organization and reduce data extraction times with DistillerSR CuratorCR by easily reusing data across literature reviews.

Capturing
Complex Output

Easily capture complex data, such as a variable number of time points across multiple studies in an easy-to-understand and ready-to-analyze way.

Smart
Forms

Cut down on literature review data cleaning, data conversions, and effective measure calculations with input validation and built-in form calculations.

Automatic and Configurable Reporting

Speed research and pass audits with DistillerSR’s configurable reporting engine, automated emailed reports, and comprehensive audit trail. Instantly produce reference lists, outcomes and summary tables, and know the provenance for each set of data.
PRISMA 2020 Chart Example, DistillerSR
Speed research and pass audits with DistillerSR’s configurable reporting engine, automated emailed reports, and comprehensive audit trail. Instantly produce reference lists, outcomes and summary tables, and know the provenance for each set of data.
PRISMA 2020 Chart Example, DistillerSR

Customizable
Reporting Engine

Build reports and schedule automated email updates to stakeholders. Integrate your data with third-party reporting applications and databases with DistillerSR API.

Auto-Generated
Reports

View, edit and download standard reports, like PRISMA 2020 diagram, inter-rater reliability scores and admin reports for your literature reviews.

Comprehensive
Audit-Trail

Automatically keeps track of every entry and decision providing transparency and reproducibility in your literature review.

Our Notified Body loves the PRISMA diagrams and process outputs which help us in delivering compliant results that meet their expectations.
Donna Mitchell-Magald, C.R. Bard Davol

Easy-to-use Literature Review Project Management

Facilitate project management throughout the literature review process with real-time user and project metric monitoring, reusable configurations, and granular user permissions.

DistillerSR Project Management Screenshot

Facilitate project management throughout the review process with real-time user and project metric monitoring, reusable configurations, and granular user permissions.

DistillerSR Project Management Screenshot

Real-Time User and
Project Metrics

Monitor teams and literature review progress in real-time, improving management and quality oversight into projects.

Repeatable, Configurable
Processes

Reuse the same configurations and reports by creating a form, report, and even entire project templates that meet your protocol requirements.

Secure Literature
Reviews

Single sign-on (SSO) and fully configurable user roles and permissions simplify the literature reviewer experience while also ensuring data integrity and security.

I can’t think of a way to do reviews faster than with DistillerSR. Being able to monitor progress and collaborate with team members, no matter where they are located makes my life a lot easier.

Lisa Waddell, Public Health Agency of Canada

DistillerSR Frequently Asked Questions

What types of reviews can be done with DistillerSR? Systematic reviews, living reviews, rapid reviews, or clinical evaluation report (CER) literature reviews?

Literature reviews can be a very simple or highly complex process, and literature reviews can use a variety of methods for finding, assessing, and presenting evidence. We describe DistillerSR as a literature review software because it supports all types of reviews, from systematic reviews to rapid reviews, and from living reviews to CER literature reviews.

DistillerSR software is used by over 300 customers in many different industries to support their evidence generation initiatives, from guideline development to HEOR analysis to CERs to post-market surveillance (PMS) and pharmacovigilance.

What are some of DistillerSR’s capabilities that support conducting systematic reviews?

Systematic reviews are the gold standard of literature reviews that aim to identify and screen all evidence relating to a specific research question. DistillerSR facilitates systematic reviews through a configurable, transparent, reproducible process that makes it easy to view the provenance of every cell of data.

DistillerSR was originally designed to support systematic reviews. The software handles dual reviewer screening, conflict resolution, capturing exclusion reasons while you work, risk of bias assessments, duplicate detection, multiple database searches, and reporting templates such as PRISMA. DistillerSR can readily scale for systematic reviews of all sizes, supporting more than 700,000 references per project through a robust enterprise-grade technical architecture. Using software like DistillerSR makes conducting systematic reviews easier to manage and configure to produce transparent evidence-based research faster and more accurately.

How does DistillerSR support clinical evaluation reports (CERs) and performance evaluation reports (PERs) program management?

The new European Union Medical Device Regulation (EU-MDR) and In-Vitro Device Regulation (EU-IVDR) require medical device manufacturers to increase the frequency, traceability, and overall documentation for CERs in the MDR program or PERs in the IVDR counterpart. Literature review software is an ideal tool to help you comply with these regulations.

DistillerSR automates literature reviews to enable a more transparent, repeatable, and auditable process, enabling manufacturers to create and implement a standard framework for literature reviews. This framework for conducting literature reviews can then be incorporated into all CER and PER program management plans consistently across every product, division, and research group.

How can DistillerSR help rapid reviews?

DistillerSR AI is ideal to speed up the rapid review process without compromising on quality. The AI-powered screening enables you to find references faster by continuously reordering relevant references, resulting in accelerated screening. The AI can also double-check your exclusion decisions to ensure relevant references are not left out of the rapid review.

DistillerSR title screening functionality enables you to quickly perform title screening on large numbers of references.

Does DistillerSR support living reviews?

The short answer is yes. DistillerSR has multiple capabilities that automate living systematic reviews, such as automatically importing newly published references into your projects and notifying reviewers that there’s screening to do. You can also put reports on an automated schedule so you’re never caught off guard when important new data is collected. These capabilities help ensure the latest research is included in your living systematic review and that your review is up-to-date. 

How can DistillerSR help ensure the accuracy of Literature and Systematic reviews?

The quality of systematic reviews is foundational to evidence-based research. However, quality may be compromised because systematic reviews – by their very nature – are often tedious and repetitive, and prone to human error. Tracking all review activity in systematic review software, like DistillerSR, and making it easy to trace the provenance of every cell of data, delivers total transparency and auditability into the systematic review process. DistillerSR enables reviewers to work on the same project simultaneously without the risk of duplicating work or overwriting each other’s results. Configurable workflow filters ensure that the right references are automatically assigned to the right reviewers, and DistillerSR’s cross-project dashboard allows reviewers to monitor to-do lists for all projects from one place.

Why should I add DistillerSR to my Literature and Systematic Review Toolbox and retire my current spreadsheet solution?

It’s estimated that 90% of spreadsheets contain formula errors and approximately 50% have material defects. These errors, coupled with the time and resources necessary to fix them, adversely impact the management of the systematic review process. DistillerSR software was specifically designed to address the challenges faced by systematic review authors, namely the ever-increasing volume of research to screen and extract, review bottlenecks, and regulatory requirements for auditability and transparency, as well as a tool for managing a remote global workforce. Efficiency, consistency, better collaboration, and quality control are just a few of the benefits you’ll get when you choose DistillerSR’s systematic review process over a manual spreadsheet tool for your reviews.

What is the role of AI in your systematic review process?

DistillerSR AI enables the automation of the logistic-heavy tasks involved in conducting a systematic literature review, such as finding references faster using AI to continuously reorder references based on relevance. Continuous AI Reprioritization uses machine learning to learn from the references you are including and excluding and automatically reorder the ones you have left to screen, putting the most pertinent references in front of you first. This means that you find included references much more quickly during the screening process. DistillerSR also uses classifiers, which use NLP to classify and process information in the systematic review.  DistillerSR can also increase the thoroughness of your systematic review by having AI double-check your exclusion decisions.

What about the security and scalability of systematic literature reviews done on DistillerSR?

DistillerSR builds security, scalability, and availability into everything we do, so you can focus on producing evidence-based research faster, more accurately, and more securely with our  systematic review software. We undergo an annual independent third-party audit and certify our products using the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants SOC 2 framework. In terms of scalability, systematic review projects in DistillerSR can easily handle a large number of references; some of our customers have over 700,000 references in their projects.

Do you offer any commitments on the frequency of new product and capability launches?

We pride ourselves on listening to and working with our customers to regularly introduce new capabilities that improve DistillerSR and the systematic review process. We plan on offering two major releases a year in addition to two minor feature enhancements. We notify customers in advance about upcoming releases, host webinars, develop tools and training to introduce the new capabilities, and provide extensive release notes for our reviewers.

I have a unique literature review protocol. Is your software configurable with my literature review data and process?

Configurability is one of the key foundations of DistillerSR software. In fact, with over 300 customers in many different industries, we have yet to see a literature review protocol that our software couldn’t handle. DistillerSR is a professional B2B SaaS company with an exceptional customer success team that will work with you to understand your unique requirements and systematic review process to get you started quickly. Our global support team is available 24/7 to help you.

Still unsure if DistillerSR will meet your systematic literature review requirements?

Adopting a new software is about more than just money. New software is also about commitment and trusting that the new platform will match your systematic review and scalability needs. We have resources to help you in your analysis and decision: check out the systematic review software checklist or the literature review software checklist.