Systematic Reviews & Other Evidence Synthesis

A citation management program, also known as a reference manager, will save you a lot of time when doing your evidence synthesis. You can use tools like Zotero, EndNote, or RefWorks to store and organize the citations collected during your screening and automatically format in-text citations and the bibliography in your manuscript. You can also use these tools to de-duplicate your search results, particularly if you're not already using another tool for your evidence synthesis project that can accomplish that task, such as Covidence or Rayyan.

The key to citation management success is to decide on a tool and utilize it consistently among all research team members from the beginning of your search process. There might be a slight learning curve if you're new to the tool, but it will save you time and headaches over the long run.

Zotero is open source and free for everyone. UR faculty and students have free access to EndNote and RefWorks via the River Campus Libraries. See our guide for more information:

You will likely retrieve multiple versions of the same study as you search many databases, and will need to de-duplicate your results before article screening. After you've performed your searches and imported the results into your citation management software:

• In Zotero, click on the "Duplicate Items" collection in your library. You can resolve duplicates by merging the files. 
• In EndNote, from the menu bar select “Library” → “Find Duplicates.” You can select which of the duplicate records to keep by clicking “Keep This Record.” You can also keep both records by clicking “Skip,” which will cause the records to be added to a “Duplicate References” folder.
• In RefWorks, go to All References. Select Tools → Find Duplicates. Select the criteria for matching according to the details beneath each of the options. Select Find Duplicates. If any duplicates are found, they are highlighted and pre-selected to make them easy to delete.

Note: Evidence synthesis applications like Covidence and Rayyan can also automatically de-duplicate your results. In fact, you might find it easier to incorporate de-duplication into your workflow with them if you're already using these tools. Even so, a reference manager will still be useful during your manuscript preparation.