PRISMA Diagram
A flow diagram that reports how many records were found, screened, excluded, and included at each stage of a systematic review.
A PRISMA diagram is a standardized flowchart used in systematic reviews to report the flow of records through the review process. It shows how many records were retrieved from databases and other sources, how many duplicates were removed, how many titles, abstracts, and full texts were screened, how many were excluded and why, and how many studies were finally included. PRISMA stands for Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses.
If your thesis contains a systematic or scoping review, examiners will expect a PRISMA diagram, because it makes your screening process auditable at a glance. Keep running counts from your very first search, including reasons for each full-text exclusion, since rebuilding the numbers afterward is error-prone. The diagram also protects you in the defense: questions about coverage can be answered by pointing to the documented flow.
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