Hey everyone,
I want to share something new. It's called Zynthia, and it's a startup I'm co-founding with two others here in the UK. We're building it for researchers, and specifically for anyone who has ever been through the pain of conducting a systematic literature review (SLR).
If you've never done one: lucky you. If you have, you'll know exactly why this exists.
The problem with systematic reviews
A systematic literature review is one of the most rigorous things you can do in academic research. You define a search strategy, run it across multiple databases, screen hundreds (sometimes thousands) of papers, extract data, and document every decision so that someone else could replicate your exact process. It's painstaking, and it's important. These reviews form the evidence base for a lot of real-world decisions in medicine, policy, and beyond.
But here's the thing: the whole process is fundamentally broken when it comes to time.
You spend months doing a review. By the time you submit, your search date is already six months old. Journals and panels often ask you to re-run the search to show it's current, which can mean re-screening dozens of new papers, re-running your entire PRISMA flow, and spending weeks on work you've essentially already done. And if your review takes another year through peer review? The cycle repeats.
The result is that researchers either rush to submit to lock in a search date, or they end up with a published review that's already outdated. Neither is good.
What Zynthia does
Zynthia's core idea is simple: instead of treating a systematic review as a one-time project with a fixed search date, make it a living process with continuous monitoring.
Here's how it works:
1. Set up your search strategy — define your search terms, databases, and inclusion criteria. This takes about an hour the first time.
2. Weekly monitoring — Zynthia monitors the databases continuously and flags new relevant papers to you every week. You review a handful of new papers rather than hundreds all at once.
3. Submit whenever you're ready — because you've been reviewing incrementally, your search date is always current. There's no scramble to re-run the search before submission.
On top of the workflow itself, Zynthia generates a complete audit trail of every decision you make, so when a reviewer asks "how did you decide to exclude this paper?" you have a timestamped, documented answer. And when you're ready to submit, it produces publication-ready PRISMA flow diagrams and compliance checklists in one click.
The AI pieces are deliberately human-in-the-loop. Zynthia can assist with title and abstract screening, but every inclusion or exclusion decision is yours, which is how it should be for work that'll go into a published paper.
Who it's for
We're building for three groups:
- PhD students doing their first major SLR, who need both the methodological guardrails and the time savings
- Established researchers who know the process well but want to cut the overhead of repeat searches and manual PRISMA formatting
- Institutions that want oversight and quality assurance across multiple reviews being run by their teams
Where things are at
The waitlist is live at zynthia.ai and we already have over 150 researchers signed up for the July 2026 cohort. If you're a researcher, PhD student, or work in a field that uses systematic reviews, I'd love for you to check it out and get early access.
This project has pushed me into a part of the research tooling space I hadn't explored before. I've learned a lot about how researchers actually work, and the gap between the ideal rigorous process and the pragmatic shortcuts people end up taking just to finish. Zynthia is our attempt to close that gap without compromising the rigour.
More updates coming soon.
Ashkan