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Introducing Littview
Every systematic review begins with a moment of optimism and a very large file.
The searches are done, the export lands — three, four, maybe ten thousand rows of titles and abstracts — and somewhere between opening that file and publishing the review, the project quietly changes shape. What started as a research question becomes a logistics operation: a spreadsheet named screening_FINAL_v3_realfinal.xlsx, an email thread called "papers for you", a folder of PDFs in three naming conventions, and the slow-building dread that the PRISMA numbers won't add up on the first try. They rarely do.
If you've run a review, you know the feeling. The rigor is the whole point — two people screening independently, every exclusion justified, every count traceable — and yet the tools rarely help you be rigorous. Mostly, you end up being rigorous despite them.
Littview is our answer to that: a modern home for systematic literature reviews. One place where the whole review lives, from the raw search export to a drafted, PRISMA-compliant report.
One place, the whole way through
Import your references — BibTeX, RIS, PubMed, EndNote XML, or straight from Zotero — deduplicate them automatically, and screen against your own criteria, with papers distributed across reviewers, whether that's five co-reviewers or just you. Disagreements surface in one workspace with every vote, note, and highlight in view; extraction happens on a form you design, with the PDF right beside it; and the report assembles itself as you work — a live PRISMA 2020 flow diagram, a filterable evidence table, and Methods and Results sections drafted from your actual project data, ready to export to Word.
There is no separate copy of the truth in a spreadsheet, so there is nothing to reconcile at submission time. The numbers in your flow diagram are the numbers in your project — because they are the same numbers.
And all of it lives in an interface built with this decade in mind — fast, keyboard-friendly, and easy on the eyes in light or dark mode. Research software doesn't have to feel like a chore.
A word about the AI
AI helps at every stage of Littview: pre-screening papers against your criteria, proposing a way through a disagreement, pre-filling extraction fields, drafting the Methods section. We're glad it does. Systematic reviews are famous for consuming person-hours, and much of what AI takes off your plate here is time nobody will miss.
But everything it does follows one house rule: it suggests, it never silently decides. Suggestions arrive with their reasoning and a confidence score. Screening suggestions are guided by your own resolved decisions. Extraction answers point to the exact passage in the PDF they came from, so checking them takes seconds, not faith. You can overrule anything in a click, and switch AI off entirely for any collaborator. The decision stays yours. That's the closest thing we have to a motto.
Who it's for
The PhD student screening three thousand abstracts alone at 11pm. A research group spread across three time zones. The clinician on their first review, and the methodologist on their fortieth. Littview works solo and it works with invited co-reviewers — same workflow, same audit trail, and no per-seat pricing deciding who gets to take part.
Where we are
Littview is young, and we'd rather tell you that than pretend otherwise. The workflow runs end to end today, it has been stress-tested against projects with thousands of papers and multiple reviewers, and it gets better every week. If you find a sharp corner, we genuinely want to hear about it: info@littview.com. We read everything.
You can start free, today, with your own real project — no sales call, no setup meeting.
Somewhere in your future there's a version of your review with fewer spreadsheets in it. We'd love to help you write it.