User Guide
SaiLoR helps you run a Systematic Literature Review (SLR): screen candidate papers, extract data from the ones that survive, and — if you're a team — reconcile independent reviewers into one final result. Everything for a review lives in a single project JSON file on your own disk, next to its PDFs. There is no account, no server, and no sync.
Read Things to know first. It's short, and it covers the handful of mistakes that are easy to make once and expensive to make twice — including one about hand-editing the project JSON that will silently eat your changes if you don't know about it.
| Page | What's in it |
|---|---|
| Things to know | Warnings worth reading before you rely on this for real review data |
| Getting started | Opening a project, the three-pane layout, annotating, search, grabbing text from the PDF, validating |
| Screening | The fast include/exclude pass that usually comes before annotation, and starting the next phase from it |
| Working with several reviewers | Independent reviewers, Consolidation, agreement statistics, disagreements, reviewer-seat identity |
| Setting up a project | Building the annotation schema, adding papers, importing references, duplicate detection, the review protocol |
| Git support | Cloning, committing field by field, pulling, and resolving merge conflicts (desktop app only) |
npm install
npm run dev # web version, at http://localhost:5173
npm run dev:electron # desktop versionOr grab a packaged build from the project's releases page. See the main README for installation instructions.
From the start screen:
- Open project… — somebody handed you a project JSON file. Open it and start.
- New annotation JSON… — you're setting up a new review from scratch. See Setting up a project.
- Edit annotation JSON… — change an existing project's schema or paper list. Existing answers are preserved.
- New from screening… — build the next phase (annotation, or a second screening pass) from a finished screening project. See Screening.
SaiLoR runs two ways, from the same code: a desktop app (Electron) and a static web app. Almost everything in this guide works identically in both. The two exceptions:
-
Git support needs your own local
gitinstallation, which only the desktop app can reach — see Git support. - Picking a folder of PDFs, or a reference file, uses your OS's native file picker in the desktop app; the browser build uses the File System Access API (Chromium-based browsers) or a plain upload, depending on what your browser supports.
Press F1, or the ? button in the top-right corner, at any time. The help dialog describes the screen you're actually looking at (the start screen, annotating, screening, or the project editor) and lists that screen's keyboard shortcuts.
SaiLoR is free software, released under the GNU General Public License v3.0. See the LICENSE file, or gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.