The PRISMA 2020 Flow Diagram

PRISMA 2020 is the standard format reviewers use to report how records moved through a systematic review, identified, screened, assessed for eligibility, and included, along with why the rest were excluded. Most tools make you fill this in by hand after the fact. Zynthia computes it directly from your screening decisions and keeps it live as you work.

The four phases

• Identification: records identified from your imported files (broken down by source database if you used more than one), and records removed before screening, duplicates and any automated prefilter exclusions (see Importing & Prefiltering Papers).
• Screening: records screened and records excluded at that stage.
• Eligibility: reports assessed for eligibility and reports excluded, broken down by reason, including a line for exclusions attributed to one of your own review-specific criteria.
• Included: studies included in the final review.

Because Zynthia screens with a single combined AI pass rather than a separate title/abstract stage followed by full-text retrieval, "reports assessed for eligibility" reflects the same screening decision as "records screened", a footnote on the diagram makes this explicit so it's not mistaken for a data error.

Every box is clickable

Click any count to see the actual papers behind it. This is useful for sanity-checking a number that looks off, and for citing specific examples in your methods write-up.

Your eligibility criteria, for reference

Below the diagram, your inclusion and exclusion criteria are listed with a real count next to each one: how many papers were excluded for not meeting an inclusion criterion, or for matching an exclusion criterion. Criteria enforced automatically at import (like a year-range filter) are labeled as such; everything else reflects the AI's per-criterion attribution during screening. This panel is shown for reference and reported separately in your methods section, it isn't part of the formal PRISMA diagram itself.

The PRISMA checklist

Alongside the diagram, Zynthia tracks your progress against the official 27-item PRISMA 2020 reporting checklist. Only the items this app can actually verify automatically (things like whether your eligibility criteria are defined, your information sources are documented, and your study selection process is reported) count toward the completion fraction; the rest describe narrative sections (discussion, funding, risk-of-bias assessment) that you write yourself and are shown for reference, clearly marked as not tracked, rather than counted against you.

Exporting

The Export button captures the diagram itself as a PNG, JPG, or single-page PDF, ready to drop into a manuscript.