Robert McGrath
February 26, 2024 --

Introducing Literature Review by ReadCube

Introducing-Lit-Review-Blog-Image

Literature Reviews and Systemic Literature Reviews (SLRs) play a crucial role in assessing therapeutic interventions, but historically have demanded significant investments of time and resources to conduct each review. Most traditional workflows involve coordinating multiple systems in a predominantly manual process.    

Literature Review by ReadCube introduces a new end-to-end solution for teams tasked with systematically monitoring and analyzing published literature related to your company’s products and discoveries. 

This new solution builds upon ReadCube’s award-winning Literature Management platform. It’s a centralized, easy-to-use solution designed to streamline recognized industry standard procedures, reduce the risk of errors and improve team efficiency.

Rising Regulatory Requirements & Growing Literature Volume

The current landscape for companies within the pharmaceutical, medical device (MDR), laboratory-developed tests (LDT), in-vitro diagnostics (IVD), and health technology assessment (HTA) sectors is becoming increasingly complex. This complexity is driven by two primary factors.  

  • The rapid growth in the volume of scientific and medical publications.
  • The escalation of regulatory standards across major global markets, including the United States, European Union, and other international jurisdictions. 

Every week, thousands of new research papers are published, adding layers of complexity to the already daunting task of conducting SLRs essential for regulatory submissions, product development, and evidence-based practice. 

A Seamless ReadCube Integration

For the past few years, we’ve been working closely with select organizations using ReadCube to address the growing complexities of their literature review processes. The integration of Literature Review into the ReadCube platform not only makes literature reviews more efficient and manageable but also addresses multiple pain points in current manual workflows. The result is a comprehensive suite of tools designed to streamline every phase of the review process, from monitoring and selection to data extraction.

In addition to automating many traditional processes, we designed our solution from the ground-up with AI in mind. Not only can it handle the traditional requirements of a regulatory SLR process today, the configurable AI capabilities within ReadCube provide a future-proof platform ready to support organizations in navigating the increasing volume of information and stringent regulatory demands while adhering to best practices and fostering cost-effective research methodologies.

Enhancing Literature Review Processes with Advanced Workflows

Here’s how Literature Review transforms your workflow for the better:

Automate systematic searches
Configure automated, recurrent, or one-time queries using predefined search terms across selected discovery platforms, ensuring no relevant article goes unnoticed.

→ Organize results within ReadCube Libraries
Automatically route articles from your searches into your ReadCube library, where results may be further refined, tagged, deduplicated, and full text sourced. Automatically connect with prior reviews to reduce duplicative work. 

→ Design & Initiate Your Literature Review
Design a custom literature review workflow that aligns with your specific review objectives. Integrated project management enables you to assign your team to multiple stages of review with rich customizable forms.  

Optionally, you can leverage AI to further streamline and optimize your review workflows.  AI review capabilities serve to accelerate–or in certain cases even automate–reviews. Alternatively, AI can be configured to validate human reviews, helping achieve improved accuracy by flagging conflicts for review.

→Comprehensive Reporting & Citation Management
Generate customizable reports that succinctly summarize key insights, including documents compliant with PRISMA standards.  Designed to support both the internal evaluation of research findings and the fulfillment of external regulatory documentation requirements, including full audit trail logging.

Our solution is designed to align with industry best practices, including GxP guidelines, ensuring a high standard of quality and compliance in the systematic literature review process.

What You Can Do With Literature Review by ReadCube 

Screening and Review: Build custom multi-stage screening workflows that work with your organization’s standard operating procedures. 

  • Define Inclusion and Exclusion Criteria: Craft precise inclusion and exclusion criteria tailored to the unique demands of your review, ensuring clarity and specificity.
  • Conflict Identification and Resolution: Effortlessly pinpoint and resolve discrepancies among multiple reviewers to maintain uniformity and coherence throughout the review process.

Form Builder: Easily design and manage systematic review forms and questions with a powerful WYSIWYG form editor.

  • Adaptive Fields: Enhance your forms with responsive fields that adjust to user inputs, providing tailored questions for efficient and focused data gathering.
  • Expression Fields: Utilize Expression fields for detailed calculations, perfect for the precise and effortless determination of criteria such as “Oxford Levels of Evidence.”


Reporting: Tailor your literature review reports with flexible filtering, sorting, and column customization for a comprehensive overview.

  • PRISMA Diagrams: Utilize the PRISMA framework for structured reporting and visualizations, ensuring adherence to PRISMA standards.
  • Audit Logs: Track every important change and conflict in an easily accessible log.

Governance: Streamline your literature review process with advanced tools to manage permissions, set up projects, design review forms, and generate targeted reports, ensuring users on your team access only what’s necessary for their role. 

Systematic Literature Reviews are Critical to Business Units Across Industries and Departments

Whether you’re conducting Safety Reviews and Comparative Effectiveness Research or gathering Competitive Intelligence, Literature Review by ReadCube can streamline your Literature and Systematic Review activities across business units across industries and departments.  Additionally, ReadCube can help you navigate the challenges of increasing literature volumes and regulatory demands, ensuring your reviews are both comprehensive and compliant. 

Ready to see how your team can benefit from a more streamlined literature review workflow?

Request a personalized demo to see what Literature Review can do for your team.