Table 1 Guiding principles proposed at 1st ICASR meeting in Vienna (http://ebrnetwork.org/the-vienna-principles/)

• Systematic reviews involve multiple tasks, each with different issues, but all must be improved.

• Automation may assist with all tasks, from scoping reviews to identifying research gaps as well protocol development to writing and dissemination of the review.

• The processes for each task can and should be continuously improved to be more efficient and more accurate.

• Automation can and should facilitate the production of systematic reviews that adhere to high standards for the reporting, conduct, and updating of rigorous reviews.

• Developments should also provide for flexibility in combination uses, e.g., subdividing or merging steps and allowances for different users to use different interfaces.

• Different groups with different expertise are working on different parts of the problem; to improve reviews as a whole will require collaboration between these groups.

• Every automation technique should be shared, preferably by making code, evaluation data, and corpora available for free

• All automation techniques and tools should be evaluated using a recommended and replicable method with results and data reported.