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 on your own disk, next to its PDFs: a project.json file
holding the schema and paper details, plus a sibling annotations/ folder holding what's actually
been filled in. There is no account, no server, and no sync — and if you're used to older SaiLoR
projects that were a single JSON file, opening one still works exactly as before; it's upgraded to the
new layout automatically the next time it's saved.
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, highlighting/sticky notes/PDF export, 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, switching/creating branches, and resolving merge conflicts (desktop app only) |
Download the installer for your system from the releases page and run it. See the main README's Installing a release for the exact steps per system, including the one-time Gatekeeper/SmartScreen click-through an unsigned build needs on macOS and Windows.
(Building and running from source instead — for development — is covered in the main README's own Quick start.)
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 is a desktop app (Electron) — download and run the installer above. SaiLoR used to also offer a web version that ran in the browser, but that has been discontinued: browser file-system limitations made too many features (saving, git) unreliable to support real review work, so the web build now just points you back here instead of opening a project. Use the desktop app.
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.