SWIFT-Review

What SWIFT-Review is

SWIFT-Review is a desktop workbench for formulating systematic review questions and prioritizing literature for screening. It applies statistical text mining and machine learning to find topics that occur more often in a citation set and rank documents for manual review. Users can search, categorize, prioritize, visualize, and extract information from large citation collections. The ranking workflow requires an initial training seed, and the software does not estimate how many relevant articles remain above a chosen threshold. Users can import PubMed IDs or PubMed XML; PMID imports retrieve citation data through NLM’s Entrez e-Utilities interface. The guide also covers RIS files and previously saved SWIFT Text-mining Project files. Results can be exported to Excel, RIS, or plain tab-delimited text. Sciome provides installers for Windows and Mac through its applications portal, where users sign in or create a free account to download them. Installation requires administrative access. The guide lists 64-bit Windows 7, 8, or 10 and 64-bit Mac OS X 10.8 or later, with 8 GB RAM recommended; very large projects may need more. Minor updates usually occur automatically, while major updates may require administrator privileges. Sciome LLC describes itself as a research and technology consulting company providing informatics solutions for life sciences researchers.

Who it suits

SWIFT-Review suits researchers conducting systematic reviews who need to organize large citation sets and prioritize documents for manual screening. It is designed for people working on Windows or Mac who can provide an initial training seed and have administrator access to install the application.

Getting started

1. Open the Sciome applications portal.
2. Sign in or create a free Sciome account to access the installers.
3. Choose the Windows or Mac installer for a listed supported system.
4. Make sure you have administrator access to install the application.
5. Import PubMed IDs, PubMed XML, RIS files, or a saved SWIFT Text-mining Project file.
6. Provide an initial training seed for the document-ranking workflow.

Verdict

Choose SWIFT-Review if you need a free desktop tool to organize citation sets and prioritize literature for systematic review screening. Look elsewhere if your workflow requires an estimate of how many relevant articles remain above a ranking threshold.