The Screening Bottleneck Manually screening thousands of PDFs for a systematic review is a monumental, error-prone task. It consumes weeks of valuable research time. What if you could automate the initial heavy lifting? The Core Principle: Iterative Refinement The key to successful automation is not a "set-and-forget" tool, but an iterative refinement loop . You start with simple rules, validate their output on a small sample, identify errors, and refine your approach. This creates a feedback cycle where the system "learns" from your corrections, dramatically improving accuracy over time. Your Extraction Engine: GROBID For processing academic PDFs at scale, the open-source library GROBID (GeneRation Of BIbliographic Data) is indispensable. It parses PDFs to extract structured data, including the header (title, authors, abstract), the full body text, and parsed references . This transforms unstructured documents into a searchable, analyzable corpus—the essential first step for any screening pipeline.…