AIM review tool: artificial intelligence for smarter systematic review screening
In this study, we present the AIM Review Tool, a modern web-based application that integrates active and supervised machine learning to accelerate the screening of publications for systematic reviews. AIM Review combines advanced text vectorization methods with machine learning models executed directly in the web browser, enabling rapid and privacy-preserving analysis. Unlike existing tools, AIM Review uniquely incorporates nested cross-validation and semi-automated screening strategies, enhancing both efficiency and precision in evidence synthesis. Using six real-world case studies across various topics, we demonstrate substantial workload reductions through active learning, with the percentage of publications not requiring screening while achieving ≥95% recall (WSS95%) ranging from 20% to 95%. Supervised learning pipelines trained on a subset of screened records predicted the relevance of unscreened publications with balanced accuracies between 75% and 87%. AIM Review provides a flexible, scalable, and accessible solution for large-scale literature screening and can be readily integrated into existing manual workflows.
Authors
- Esther Rituerto-González (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5597-4556)
- Muhammad Ahmed (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8367-4155)
- Paris Alexandros Lalousis (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9642-3080)
- Dominic Oliver (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8920-3407)
- Fiona Coutts (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0009-8951-1467)
- Sander Leon Koole (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3422-223X)
- Sergio Mena (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5102-2336)
- Louise Moles
- Nikolaos Koutsouleris (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6825-6262)
- Paolo Fusar-Poli
- L. Bryant
- L. Promet
- G. Jacobs
- N. Sirbu
- J. von Trott
- Marinus H. van IJzendoorn
Institutions
- King's College London (GB)
- San Sebastián University (CL)
- University of Oxford (GB)
- ISPA - Instituto Universitário (PT)
- German Center for Infection Research (DE)
- German Centre for Cardiovascular Research (DE)
- Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry (DE)
- University College London (GB)
- Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (DE)
Publication Details
- Journal
- npj Artificial Intelligence
- Published
- 2026-02-21
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1038/s44387-026-00080-8
- Primary Topic
- Meta-analysis and systematic reviews
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 0.00