Living Reviews Guide

Keep Reviews Current with Review Monitoring

Run recurring searches, see genuinely new evidence ranked by relevance, and decide what enters your review.

Why Use Review Monitoring?

A published or completed systematic review starts aging as soon as new evidence appears. Review Monitoring repeats your search and prepares a controlled update queue, while preserving the state of your completed review until you explicitly accept a paper.

Key Benefits:

  • Less noise: DOI, source, and title matching remove papers already known to the project.
  • Useful ordering: Candidates are ranked against your criteria and previously included evidence.
  • Controlled updates: Accept or dismiss candidates from a separate inbox; nothing is silently added to the review.

How to Set Up a Monitor

From a Project

Open the Monitoring tab of a project, enter the search you want to repeat, select the databases, and start the monitor. Lumina immediately schedules the first scan and repeats it weekly.

  1. 1. Go to your project page.
  2. 2. Select the "Monitoring" tab.
  3. 3. Click "Set up monitoring".
  4. 4. Confirm the query and databases, then start the monitor.

From Database Search

After checking a database search, choose Monitor this search. The monitor stays linked to that project and reuses the query and database selection.

  1. 1. Open a project's database search.
  2. 2. Run and inspect your search.
  3. 3. Click "Monitor this search".
  4. 4. Review future matches in the project's update inbox.

Triage New Evidence

The update inbox separates high, possible, and low relevance candidates. Open a paper's source, select useful candidates, then accept them into screening or dismiss them. A completed project is reopened only when at least one genuinely new paper is accepted.

Monitor Control Panel

The global Review Monitoring page shows active monitors, pending candidate counts, last-run dates, and controls to pause or resume recurring scans.

Alert Query / Project Active
"long covid" AND rehabilitation PubMed • Weekly
Systematic Review Project #14 OpenAlex • Monthly