Systematic literature reviews (SLRs) are important because they provide a rigorous, transparent, and replicable way to understand what is known about a topic. Unlike a general narrative review, an SLR follows explicit procedures for identifying, selecting, evaluating, and synthesizing prior studies. This helps reduce bias and produces a more reliable overview of existing evidence. They are especially useful at the start of a project because they help researchers identify gaps, recurring challenges, dominant approaches, and opportunities for future work.

A strong SLR begins with a protocol that defines the review objective, research questions, databases, search strategy, inclusion and exclusion criteria, and approach to quality assessment and data extraction. After planning, researchers search selected sources, remove duplicates, and screen studies by title and abstract before moving to full-text assessment.

PRISMA provides the reporting framework that makes systematic reviews transparent and traceable. The PRISMA 2020 expanded checklist asks authors to clearly report the rationale, objectives, eligibility criteria, information sources, search strategy, and study selection process.

The following prompt is designed for the abstract screening stage of a systematic review. The abstracts can be directly exported from databases like Scopus (see video tutorial below on csv export in Scopus). It uses a structured three-stage workflow so that the research purpose, research questions, and eligibility criteria are established before any screening begins. This supports a more transparent and consistent filtering process and aligns well with PRISMA-style reporting of screening decisions. But do not treat this as final result and re-check. AI tools may not fully judge on relevance of certain concepts for your work and also abstracts may not contain full information.

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