Abstract
Abstract
Objective
Comprehensive systematic review searches routinely retrieve tens of thousands of records, creating a substantial title and abstract screening burden that is slow, resource-intensive, and costly, particularly for research teams that lack access to AI-assisted screening tools.
Methods
OlivePICO is a free, browser-based prescreening tool that applies structured PICO (Population, Intervention, Comparator, Outcome) domain matching and configurable exclusion filters to reduce the record pool before importing it into collaborative screening platforms, such as Rayyan or Covidence, without requiring installation, subscription, or programming expertise. OlivePICO additionally segregates records bearing explicit retraction signals into a dedicated queue, separate from the screening stream, and supports exportable PICO presets for reproducible, shareable configurations.
Results
OlivePICO was validated against a completed deprescribing systematic review (PROSPERO: [Blinded]; n = 16 confirmed included studies), achieving 100% sensitivity (16/16), with a validated false-negative rate of 0.7% (1/150; 95% CI: 0.0–3.7%). In prospective applications to two independent fall-related systematic reviews, records uniquely captured by OlivePICO but missed by the Python pipeline were protocol-relevant in 62.1% and 61.9% of cases, whereas records uniquely captured by the Python pipeline but missed by OlivePICO were protocol-relevant in only 0.4% and 9.6% of cases.
Conclusion
PICO-anchored pre-screening substantially reduced the volume and improved the protocol relevance of records forwarded to human screeners compared to non-structured keyword filtering. OlivePICO is freely available at https://www.olivepico.com and requires no installation, subscription, or data upload.