Systematic Review Tools
Covidence - fee-based online software to manage your systematic review process and team.
Rayyan - fee-based online software to manage your systematic review process and team although a free option is available.
Pico Portal - online software to manage your systematic review process and team. Free for one project at a time.
Colandr: Free software; especially helpful in sorting citations.
Abstrackr: Free, open-source web-based tool for screening abstracts.
SR Tool Box - "A community-driven web-based catalog of systematic review tools." Searchable.
SR Accelerator - free software; validated deduplication tool for faster deduplication of search results, a word frequency analyser to help with search strategy development, a search translator to speed up translation of searches from PubMed/Ovid MEDLINE to other major databases, and a hotkey tool to make screening articles in EndNote easier.
Using Citation Management Software for Systematic Reviews
The USF librarians support and teach EndNote, Zotero, and Mendeley citation management tools. These tools can also be used to facilitate data collection/analysis and methodology documentation of a systematic review. For more on these tools, see the Citation Management Software guide.
Pros
- Flexible; not constrained by a specific process or project structure, reason codes, etc.
- Group sharing of folders
- Zotero and Mendeley are free; EndNote is provided free of charge by USF
- Access from all platforms and devices through account syncing
- Lots of vendor documentation and training and YouTube videos on use of these apps
- Each of the applications integrates with Microsoft Word and possibly Google Docs
- Data can be easily exported and imported to other applications
Cons
- Not specifically designed as systematic review tools
- Can't systematically assign roles to members of group (reviewer, adjudicator, etc): requires additional planning and manual process
- Limited results reporting
Process (using Zotero terminology and screenshots)
- Create group and invite group members
- Use group description to document search terms, databases used, and inclusion/exclusion criteria
- Folders/Collections
- Use Folders/collections to keep track of counts of records retrieved, unduped, included, etc. for documentation of methodology and results in review
- Create folders for results from each database
- Create All results folder
- Create Unduped results folder
- You can use auto removal of duplicates, but this needs to be followed up with manual review
- Create folder for Included papers
- You can enter the article link or attach the pdf to each record for ease of use, annotation, etc.
- Zotero's free account only provides 300MB of storage
- You can enter the article link or attach the pdf to each record for ease of use, annotation, etc.
- Sample folder structure
- Use Folders/collections to keep track of counts of records retrieved, unduped, included, etc. for documentation of methodology and results in review
- Use Tags to:
- Indicate inclusion/exclusion
- Document reasons for inclusion/exclusion
- Identify reviewer
- Identify topic coverage of article for discussion and results sections of review
- Sample of tags for systematic review about library instruction related to fake news/disinformation
- Notes
- use to document thoughts, significant parts of article for discussion in review
