Evidence synthesis is essential—but screening thousands of citations is costly, slow, and labor-intensive. Johns Hopkins’ Lisa Wilson, Research Associate in the Department of Health Policy & Management at the Bloomberg School of Public Health, along with Dr. Karen Robinson, Professor of Medicine and Co-Director of JHU’s Evidence-based Practice Center, tackled this head-on in their recent study presented at the 2024 Global Evidence Summit – showing the reliability of PICO Portal’s priority screening algorithm.
In a series of eight chronic kidney disease treatment reviews and a total of 29,582 unique citations, they used PICO Portal to assist with title/abstract screening. Citations were re-ranked based on predicted inclusion, allowing teams to stop screening early while maintaining 95% recall—dramatically reducing reviewer workload with no impact on the review findings. Prioritized screening still identified the studies eligible at full text, with a sensitivity of 0.98 (95% CI 0.90 to 1.00).
Conducted and authored independently; co-author Karen Robinson has a non-financial affiliation with PICO Portal.