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Library guide for HLSC 3P80

Managing citations in rapid reviews

You will be retrieving large numbers of citations - possibly hundreds - with your literature search.

It's crucial to store and organize these citations in a systematic way:

  • guidelines for systematic reviews and other evidence synthesis reviews require you to track:
    • the number of citations you retrieve
    • the number of duplicate citations you remove from the original pool
    • the number of citations at every stage of the screening process

Citation management software helps you to:

  • stay organized, with all your citations in one library
    • create collections according to specific topics or purposes
  • share the same pool of citations across the entire team of reviewers
  • track the numbers you need to report

The information below provides a good overview of how citation management software works and suggests some free options.

Note that some free citation managers may not be robust enough to handle a large evidence synthesis review or to perform well at removing duplicate citations.

Citation Management Tools: An Introduction

Citation Management

This page highlights a few of the most popular citation management tools.  Many more free and paid tools may be found online. A more extensive list may be found here.

zoterobib is an excellent tool that creates citations using ISBNs, DOIs, PMIDs...


Zotero


EndNote


Mendeley