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Paste your inclusion and exclusion criteria alongside an abstract and Anara returns a decision: include, exclude, or uncertain, with a brief rationale citing which criterion applies. Work through your shortlist before committing to full-text import. For systematic reviewers at the abstract screening stage who want a consistent, documented decision for each paper.

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1. Describe the task

Abstract screening is the most repetitive phase of a systematic review. You have a shortlist of two hundred abstracts from your database search. Each one needs a decision: include for full-text review, exclude, or set aside as uncertain. The criteria are fixed. The decisions pile up. Anara applies your inclusion and exclusion criteria to each abstract you give it and returns a documented decision. The decision names which criterion was triggered and why. The rationale is yours to review, accept, or override. Anara does not make the final call; you do. What Anara produces is a consistent, criterion-level record for each abstract that you would otherwise have to write from scratch. Keep in mind that Anara is not a replacement for specialist tools like Rayyan or Covidence at the scale of a ten-thousand-record database export. At that scale, deduplication and batch processing are the bottleneck, and dedicated screening tools are built for it. Anara handles the focused case: the shortlist you have already narrowed down, where you want a documented decision and rationale for each abstract before committing to full-text imports. Here a public health PhD student is screening sixty-three abstracts for a systematic review on compassion fatigue interventions in emergency service workers. 
I am screening abstracts for a systematic review on compassion fatigue interventions in emergency service workers. My inclusion and exclusion criteria are:

Inclusion: peer-reviewed empirical studies, participants are emergency service workers (police, fire, paramedics, or similar), intervention addresses compassion fatigue or secondary traumatic stress, published 2010 or later.
Exclusion: case studies or anecdotal reports, participants are exclusively healthcare workers (not emergency services), no measurable outcome reported, non-English language.

Apply these criteria to the following abstract. Return: decision (Include / Exclude / Uncertain), which criteria drove the decision, and one sentence explaining the judgment.

[Paste the abstract here]

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2. Give Anara context

Required context
  • Your inclusion and exclusion criteria, stated clearly.
  • The abstract or set of abstracts to screen.
Optional context
  • One or two already-decided examples (an include and an exclude from the same review). Gives Anara a calibration reference for how you are applying the criteria in practice.
  • Your PICO framework if you have one. Anara can apply population, intervention, comparator, and outcome constraints directly alongside your written criteria.

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3. What Anara creates

A screening decision for each abstract, with the criterion that drove the decision named explicitly and a one-sentence rationale. The output is the record you need to document your screening process. For uncertain decisions, Anara flags the specific criterion that is ambiguous so you can apply your own judgment to that dimension. The decisions are consistent across abstracts because the criteria are applied from the same prompt each time.

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4. Follow-up prompts

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Screen a batch of ten at once

When you have a stack of abstracts to work through and want to run them together. 
Apply the same screening criteria to the following ten abstracts. Return a numbered list: each abstract number, the decision (Include / Exclude / Uncertain), and the one-sentence rationale. Flag any abstract where the decision is uncertain and explain which criterion is unclear.

[Paste ten abstracts, numbered 1 through 10]

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Resolve an uncertain decision

When an abstract landed as uncertain and you want to think through the criterion more carefully. 
Abstract 7 was flagged as uncertain because the participant population includes both emergency services workers and healthcare workers without separate reporting. Does the abstract give enough information to apply the population criterion? What would I need from the full text to make a definite decision?

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Log the screening decisions as a note

When you want a running record of decisions from the session. 
Save all the screening decisions from this session as a note called "Screening Log: Compassion Fatigue Review." Format as a table: abstract number, title (from the abstract), decision, and rationale.

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5. Tricks, tips, and troubleshooting

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How you word your prompt shapes what you get

State each inclusion criterion on a separate line. Criteria written as a single paragraph are harder for Anara to apply individually, and the rationale in the output will be less specific about which criterion triggered the decision. Use “Include / Exclude / Uncertain” as the decision vocabulary explicitly so the output is consistent across abstracts. If your criteria have edge cases you already know about (for example, studies where emergency service workers are a subgroup of a larger clinical sample), name the edge case in the criteria so Anara has a rule to apply rather than a judgment to make.

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Check the output against your own understanding

Abstract screening is a human judgment call that Anara supports but does not replace. Abstracts are written to include certain information and omit others. A criterion that requires “measurable outcome reported” may be impossible to apply from the abstract alone if the authors described the intervention without reporting results. When Anara flags an abstract as uncertain, treat that as a cue for full-text review rather than an automatic exclude. The final screening decisions are yours; Anara produces a consistent documented draft, not a binding verdict.

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What to do with the output next

Save the screening log at the end of each session and move directly to importing the included abstracts for full-text review. For papers marked Uncertain, add them to a separate folder for full-text review before making the final decision. When the screening is complete, use the systematic extraction workflow to pull structured data from each included paper using a PICO extraction template.