PRISMA
Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses — the standard reporting checklist and flow diagram that journals require for systematic review publications.
What it means
PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses) is a reporting guideline — a checklist of 27 items and a standardized flow diagram — that specifies what a published systematic review must report. It was developed to improve the transparency and completeness of systematic review reporting and is required by most medical, public health, and social science journals that publish systematic reviews.
The PRISMA flow diagram is the visual component most researchers recognize: a four-box flowchart showing how many records were identified, screened, assessed for eligibility, and ultimately included in the review, with reasons for exclusion at each stage.
PRISMA 2020 (the current version) updated the original 2009 checklist to reflect advances in systematic review methodology and the growing role of automation tools.
Related variants include PRISMA-P (for protocols), PRISMA-NMA (for network meta-analyses), and PRISMA-ScR (for scoping reviews).
Why it matters for researchers
Journal compliance: Most journals publishing systematic reviews require authors to submit a completed PRISMA checklist alongside the manuscript. Failure to complete the checklist is a common reason for desk rejection.
How AI tools interact with PRISMA:
- Tools like Rayyan and Elicit can help you work through the screening and extraction stages, but you still need to manually track the counts for each box in the PRISMA flow diagram
- The “Identification” box in the PRISMA diagram requires you to report which databases were searched and how many records each returned — AI tools that aggregate multiple sources can make this harder to track if you don’t log intermediate results
- PRISMA compliance is about reporting, not just doing — even an AI-assisted review must be able to show its full methodology trail