Free CER Literature Search Tool: Build a Traceable Evidence Workpaper
Find candidate clinical evidence, preserve the exact search, and compose source-linked screening, study, outcome, appraisal, claim, and gap tables for CER work.
Find candidate evidence, preserve the exact search, and compose source-linked screening, study, outcome, appraisal, and claim-evidence tables
Use the tool to build the evidence layer, not a generic CER template
A blank CER template does not solve the hardest part of clinical evaluation: finding relevant evidence, preserving the search, deciding what belongs, extracting the reported results, and showing how each claim connects to sources. CER Evidence Finder & Workpaper is built for that evidence layer.
Open the tool above and describe the device, population, indication, relevant outcomes, known risks, and state-of-the-art comparator. The tool returns a durable Evidence Pack and can compose the selected records into structured workpaper tables.
Start with device-specific context
A product name alone usually produces noisy results. Include the clinical purpose and the characteristics that determine relevance. Useful context includes:
- intended purpose and indications;
- target population and clinical setting;
- device technology and important variants;
- claimed clinical benefits and relevant outcomes;
- known risks and safety endpoints;
- comparator or state-of-the-art alternatives;
- synonyms, former names, and technical terminology.
Keep the claim separate from the search logic. The search should be capable of finding unfavorable and inconclusive evidence, not only papers that repeat the desired benefit.
Preserve an immutable Evidence Pack
The Evidence Pack stores the submitted context, exact source queries, candidate records, normalized results, raw source material, quality report, and manifest. That makes the retrieval step reproducible. A later screening or composition run should not silently rewrite what the original search returned.
Inspect the source coverage and cutoff date. The current tool is best treated as a bounded evidence finder and workpaper builder. If the task requires a complete systematic search, the final strategy may need additional databases, full-text retrieval, handsearching, and documented query variants.
Screen records with explicit decisions
For each candidate, record include, exclude, or unclear and preserve the reason. A title or abstract may be enough to exclude an obviously irrelevant record, but it is not always enough to appraise methods, adverse events, subgroup definitions, or numerical outcomes. Label the evidence depth honestly.
The Clinical Trials search can supplement literature records when ongoing, completed, or unpublished study context matters. Keep trial registry records and publications connected but do not automatically treat them as duplicate evidence.
Compose the workpaper tables
| Table | What it should preserve |
|---|---|
| Screening | Candidate, decision, reason, and source |
| Studies | Design, population, device, comparator, follow-up, and citation |
| Outcomes | Measure, time point, groups, reported values, and locator |
| Appraisal | Limitations, applicability, and confidence |
| Claims | Support, contradiction, or unresolved relationship to evidence |
| Gaps | Missing outcomes, follow-up, populations, full text, or safety evidence |
Keep extraction and appraisal separate. Extraction records what the source reports; appraisal records how much weight or applicability it has for the current product and claim.
Continue into CER and PMS review
Once the evidence tables are stable, use PMS / PMCF / CER Review to inspect whether the clinical evaluation and post-market evidence remain aligned. AI Search can help answer narrower questions across the selected context, but each material conclusion should still point back to the evidence record.
A generated narrative should be downstream of the workpaper. The workpaper is easier to refresh, diff, validate, and export than a prose document that contains no structured source lineage.
A quick quality check
Before using the workpaper, confirm that:
- device context, sources, queries, and cutoff dates are preserved;
- every screening decision links to a candidate record;
- abstract-only and full-text evidence are distinguished;
- extracted numbers match the source and include a locator;
- unfavorable and inconclusive evidence remain visible;
- appraisal limitations are not mixed into factual extraction;
- claims do not outrun their linked evidence;
- search limitations are stated rather than hidden.
The tool does not make clinical evaluation effortless. It makes the evidence work inspectable and reusable, which is the part that generic templates and ungrounded chat answers usually fail to provide.
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