Step 6: Screen full texts

The full text of potentially eligible references will be scrutinized (as identified in step 5), again by at least two independent reviewers. This is particularly important for records in which the title and/or abstract provided ambivalent information on eligibility. EndNote provides a full text fetch function which is able to automatically find most of the full texts available through institutional licenses. Remaining full texts can be searched manually. A tool which renders manual full text search particularly quick is Google Scholar with its sensitive search engine, e.g., by searching for the respective study title.

Of note, in most cases it is more efficient to combine full text screening with data extraction (step 7).