ASReview

About ASReview

ASReview (Active learning for Systematic Reviews) is an open-source research tool developed at Utrecht University in the Netherlands since 2019. It applies machine learning and active learning techniques to dramatically accelerate the systematic literature review process used in academic research, healthcare evidence synthesis, and policy analysis. Systematic reviews traditionally require researchers to manually screen thousands of paper abstracts to identify relevant studies — a process that can take months. ASReview uses active learning to continuously re-rank unscreened papers based on the researcher's inclusion/exclusion decisions, surfacing the most likely relevant papers first. Studies show this can reduce screening workload by 80-95% while maintaining review quality. The tool is fully open-source (Apache 2.0 license) and can run entirely offline on a researcher's local machine. No data is sent to external servers, making it one of the strongest tools for data sovereignty in this directory. The AI models run locally, and all research data stays under the researcher's complete control. ASReview is funded by public research grants and maintained by an academic team at Utrecht University. It is free to use with no commercial licensing required. The tool has been adopted by research institutions and systematic review teams worldwide, particularly in healthcare, social sciences, and environmental research.