PICO Portal currently does not support the automatic migration of screening decisions that have been made in Excel. To migrate ongoing projects to PICO Portal, you will need to upload the eligible articles and then include/exclude them manually at the Abstract Screening stage.
To begin migration, go to your project dashboard and navigate to Settings > Upload > PICO Portal (Excel, csv) download (click the blue download link). This will download a CSV file that you can manually modify with your article information. It will be populated with examples that you can delete.
Use the filter in your Excel template to filter Included/Excluded/Undecided (or whatever naming convention you have used for organizing decisions), then create 3 CSV files that match the naming conventions of these records to be uploaded to PICO Portal. For example:
- “Already Included”
- “Already Excluded”
- “Undecided” (if necessary)
To upload your completed CSV file, navigate to Settings > Upload > drag and drop CSV into “Upload File” > click the “Upload” button > select PICO Portal as the source file format.
Upload your first file, “Already Included”, and set the workflow to Single Review. Start screening from Abstract Screening on the project dashboard and select Yes on every record, as these should be all your previously included records.
Next, upload your second file, “Already Excluded” following the instructions for the first file. Continue screening these records as a single Reviewer, but this time select No on every record to have them be excluded, as these should all be your previously excluded records.
Once all previously included and excluded articles have been uploaded, you can upload the “Undecided” file (if necessary). At this point you can switch the workflow to however you have been screening thus far in Excel, or leave it as Single Review and continue screening the records as normal. If you would like to screen in Dual Independent Review, or Single Review + Quality Check, you will need to add at least 1 other team member.
See User Roles and Inviting Members for more information on how to invite team members to your project.
Once the Abstract Screening has been manually completed in PICO Portal the records will move on to Full-Text Review. At this point you can start screening at the Full-Text Review level. Note: You may need to upload PDFs using Rapid PDF Upload and/or LibKey (if you are a licensed user).
