Systematic Reviews and Evidence Synthesis

Saving and Documenting Searches and Results - Since reviews can take a long time to complete, it is helpful to save and set up an alert in the databases to notify you if any new articles are added that fit your search criteria. Be sure that you think through your cutoff date for your alert. At some point, you do have to publish. We recommend that you save your searches and search history from the start of the project so that you don't lose any work as you develop your search strategy.

Exporting Results - If you are following Cochrane or Campbell guidelines, you will need to keep track of how many total results you retrieve from each database as well as the number of results after deduplication. Good organization and tracking will save you a ton of headaches later in the process. 

Using Citation Managers - Citation managers help you organize and prepare your search results for the deduplication process and exporting to your screening software.

Any time you search in multiple databases, there will be duplicate results. There are many different approaches and tools for removing duplicates (de-duplication), and they all have their pros and cons. No matter which approach you choose, keep track of result totals before and after deduplication!

• RefWorks - RefWorks is a web-based personal bibliographic database manager. Use it to create your own bibliographic database, format bibliographies, and share references with colleagues or classmates. 
• Zotero  - Zotero is a citation manager that is free and open source. It's deduplication tool is not perfect, but it allows you to make decisions and will not remove anything it considers a duplicate unless you tell it to.
• Mendeley - This is another free citation manager that is a product of Elsevier. Mendeley auto-deduplicates, which is not recommended for systematic reviews.
• Excel - This is the option requiring the most work by you and many researchers like it because they control the full process. (Recommended as secondary, "by-hand" deduplication)

The Libraries currently do not provide in-house support for screening tools, however, links to training materials are provided below.

Abstrackr - abstrackR is a free and open-source web-application that makes citation-screening process of systematic reviews easier. It is a collaborative tool that facilitates screening of citations by multiple reviewers in tandem. Citations are imported and then screened by participants.

Rayyan - Rayyan is a free and open source screening tool. For more information, check out this Rayyan Tutorial video.