Systematic Reviews & Evidence Synthesis

A citation management program can provide significant time savings when doing your evidence synthesis. Programs like Endnote, Zotero or Mendeley will store and organize the citations collected during your screening, de-duplicate the results and automatically format in-text citations and bibliographies in your manuscript. Citation collections can be shared within a research team.

How are Citation Managers used for Evidence Synthesis?

Citation Managers are typically used for the following steps of an Evidence Synthesis research project:

1. Export Evidence Synthesis database (and other) search results into a citation manager after completing the search
2. Combine all of the database search results in the citation manager and complete De-duplication
3. Export results to CSV to complete title/abstract review
4. Cite While You Write when writing up the final research report 
5. Generate a Bibliography for the final research report

They are also helpful for facilitating team communication and understanding of the research project.

Caveat: There are other tools that can be used to complete the first two steps above

Further resources

Bramer, W. M., Giustini, D., de Jonge, G. B., Holland, L., & Bekhuis, T. (2016). De-duplication of database search results for systematic reviews in EndNote. Journal of the Medical Library Association : JMLA, 104(3), 240–243. https://doi.org/10.3163/1536-5050.104.3.014 

McKeown, S., & Mir, Z. M. (2024). Considerations for conducting systematic reviews: A follow-up study to evaluate the performance of various automated methods for reference de-duplication. Research synthesis methods, 15(6), 896–904. https://doi.org/10.1002/jrsm.1736