Getting Started with Zynthia
From sign-up to your first screened paper, in four steps.
Zynthia takes you from a blank review to a screened, reportable systematic literature review (SLR) in four steps: set your goal, define your criteria, import your papers, and set up screening. This guide walks through each one.
1. Your goal
Right after signing up, you'll pick a project type (Master's Dissertation, PhD Thesis, Working Paper, or a Q1–Q4 Journal target) and your field of research (Education, Medicine/Health, Business & Management, Social Sciences, Psychology, Computer Science, Engineering, Law, or Other). Zynthia uses this to pick sensible defaults later, like which project template to suggest.
2. Define your criteria
This is the most important step: it's what your AI screening and PRISMA reporting will be built on. You'll enter:
- A short description of your review's topic and objective.
- Your search strategy: either a query builder (add search terms combined with AND/OR) or per-database advanced queries if you've already run searches in Scopus, Web of Science, or similar.
- Keywords that describe your review's scope.
- Inclusion and exclusion criteria, written as free text (e.g. "Papers published since 2015", "Conference papers"). Zynthia automatically detects year-range phrasing in these ("since 2015", "2015–2023") and applies it as a hard filter at import, rather than relying on the AI to catch it every time.
- Optional scope filters: publication year range, document type, language, subject area, and country.
3. Import your papers
Upload your search results as RIS, BibTeX, CSV, TXT, or Excel files (up to 25MB each), tagging each file with its source database. Zynthia deduplicates across files and shows you a summary: records identified, duplicates removed, and unique papers ready for screening. See Importing & Prefiltering Papers for the full detail on formats and how prefiltering works.
Note: searching databases directly from within Zynthia is planned but not available yet, you'll need to run your search elsewhere and import the results.
4. Set up your review
Give your project a title, pick a template (which mainly affects suggested defaults, not your data), and choose which screening methods to enable: AI Suggestion (an include/exclude recommendation with reasoning) and/or RI Score (the Relativity Index, a calibrated 0–65 relevance score). You can also invite collaborators here. Once you finish, you land straight in the screening workspace.
Screening and beyond
From here, you'll work through papers one at a time in the screening workflow, using the AI suggestion and RI score as decision support, not a replacement for your judgment. As you screen, your PRISMA flow diagram, analytics dashboard, and Readiness Report update automatically, so you always have a live picture of how your review is progressing and what's still missing for a complete write-up.