Rayyan is a research collaboration platform trusted by over 350,000+ researchers representing 15,000 organizations across 180 countries. It is utilized by researchers to conduct systematic literature reviews–and other types of evidence synthesis–to inform all types of evidence-based decision-making. Thousands of researchers are signing up to use Rayyan each month and inviting their collaborators to join them.
The Rayyan Value Proposition:
Rayyan features a combination of advanced technologies – artificial intelligence, machine learning, and natural language processing — to power features that make complex tasks simple and easy to perform. The combined application of these various technologies allows Rayyan to turn many weeks of work into mere days for researchers who need to cut through mountains of prior research studies looking for relevant information to extract and synthesize.
Rayyan Systems is a mission-driven organization that seeks to accomplish several important and interdependent objectives. We are democratizing access to an important tool for science, to unlock the societal benefits of accelerated scientific and medical findings around the world, saving thousands of years of collective human research capacity every year that might otherwise be lost to wasteful inefficiency, by providing an environment for greater human computer-research collaboration to produce capabilities that neither humans nor computers possess alone, and building the largest community of practice of researchers united in their common pursuit of evidence-based decision-making.
Accelerated research findings mean time savings and their associated cost savings. In the context of a pandemic, it could mean life-saving interventions are delivered in time to save more lives or prevent a small problem from becoming a much greater one. In addition, the competitiveness of research teams to win grants increases as they are known for producing higher quality research with the highest levels of integrity at greater speed.
Rayyan’s Covid-19 Open Research Dataset
As an example, Rayyan hosts the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset (CORD-19) and makes it freely available to researchers around the world. Rather than starting from scratch, researchers studying COVID-19 may apply a series of filters and search terms to a growing data set of more than 800,000 references and then simply copy relevant references to their review projects. Several thousand COVID-19-related studies have been conducted using Rayyan to design interventions that are evidence-based in the fight against the pandemic.
Rayyan and the Information Explosion
The rate of publication is increasing with millions of new papers being published yearly. With the increasing publication, the number of prior studies that must be reviewed increases, and researchers are not in control of how many studies have been published about their current research topics. Although Rayyan helps alleviate this burden, it also contributes to the acceleration of research, which means the problem that Rayyan solves is one that grows the more it is solved. This reflects the fact that the pace of knowledge production shall continue to increase with the application of such technologies. Adopting a tool like Rayyan to aid in this accelerating cycle of knowledge production is perhaps a strategic capability that is fast becoming a necessity as researchers spend more time coping with the rapid expansion of the scientific corpus across disciplines.
Rayyan: for Researchers by Researchers
Rayyan believes in the ethical use of technology to produce research with the highest integrity and reproducibility. We accomplish this through a philosophy that relies upon “Researcher-in-the-Loop”, which means that Rayyan is not designed to make decisions for the researcher but aids the ability of the researcher to make decisions while recording them for research teams automatically. As a company, we continue to build technologies that adhere to this philosophy and will continue to deliver an exciting roadmap of features to fulfill our mission and objectives.
Rayyan owes much of its success to the fact that it was built with a very user-centric design philosophy, under the guidance of subject matter experts, by researchers for researchers. Researchers often share with us how grateful they are for access to a tool like Rayyan, and how easy it is to use, something that research librarians find essential when they are recommending tools to researchers. Rayyan conforms to the researcher rather than requiring the researcher to conform to a rigid, software-imposed process. This makes it more applicable to the many disciplines that conduct evidence synthesis and more varied use cases, like simply reading for relevance to learning about a topic.