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.
