Systematic reviews, scoping reviews and other evidence syntheses

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. Covidence may be more effective for managing duplicate removal.

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.

Zotero

EndNote

Mendeley