LibGuides: Systematic Review Guide: Software

Software to Support Systematic Reviews

Plan Ahead

Decide as a team what tools to use to stay organized. If you are working with team members remotely, consider using tools that allow you to collaborate on single documents instead of emailing back and forth.

It's important to decide how you will manage your search results before you start your project. Choose a system that will allow you to gather your results, remove duplicates, and cite them in your papers. Make sure the whole team agrees on which software to use and that everyone has access to it.

Tools for Managing References

You will need to use bibliographic software that allows you to save large numbers of search results from various databases, remove duplicate results, annotate, and cite the papers. Unity Health Toronto has a site licence to EndNote. Other teams have used such tools as Mendeley or Papers. We no longer recommend Reference Manager or RefWorks.

Reference Management Software (for UHT)
EndNote Resource Guide (for UHT)
UHS has a site license EndNote, which means our IT department supports it. The library offers training workshops on EndNote regularly. If you can't make it to the classes, the class handout on our EndNote Resource Guide is a good starting point
Mendeley Resource Guide (for UHT)
Mendeley is a free reference manager and academic social network. Make your own fully-searchable library in seconds, cite as you write, and read and annotate your PDFs on any device. Look for Library workshops on Mendeley this fall!
Papers
Papers helps you collect and curate the research material that you're passionate about. From citations to search, Papers will improve the way you find, organize, read, cite and share.
University of Toronto's Citation Management Guide
See especially the comparison table: What's the best citation management software for me?

Systematic Review Software

Tools for Managing Reviews, Screening, and Extracting Data

You will need to keep track of whether an article meets your inclusion criteria and why. An Excel spreadsheet organized by article and inclusion and exclusion criteria can work for this but the development of sophisticated systematic review software has made the process much more streamlined.

Systematic review software includes RevMan, Covidence, EPPI Reviewer, DistillerSR, or Rayyan. You may need a subscription to this software.

Try searching the Systematic Review Toolbox, “a community-driven, searchable, web-based catalogue of tools that support the systematic review process across multiple domains” for other software tools.

CADIMA
CADIMA is a free EU-funded web tool facilitating the conduct and documentation of systematic reviews, systematic maps and further literature reviews.
Colandr
Colandr is an open access, machine-learning assisted tool for conducting evidence synthesis. This tool uses machine learning, natural language processing, and text-mining functions to partially automate finding relevant citations and extract desired data from PDF articles.
Covidence
A web-based software platform that streamlines the production of systematic reviews. It supports citation screening, full text review, risk of bias assessment, extraction of study characteristics and outcomes, and the export of data and references.
Covidence for UofT Affiliates
NEW: University of Toronto affiliates now have free, unlimited access.
DistillerSR
DistillerSR is systematic review software. It was designed from the ground up to give you a better review experience, faster project completion and transparent, audit-ready results.
EPPI-Reviewer 4
EPPI-Reviewer 4 is software for all types of literature review, including systematic reviews, meta-analyses, 'narrative' reviews and meta-ethnographies.
GRADEpro
GRADEpro (GRADEproGDT) is the software used to create Summary of Findings (SoF) tables in Cochrane systematic reviews.
Rayyan
Rayyan is a free web application to help systematic review authors perform their job in a quick, easy and enjoyable fashion. Authors create systematic reviews, collaborate on them, maintain them over time and get suggestions for article inclusion.
RevMan (Review Manager)
Review Manager (RevMan) is the software used for preparing and maintaining Cochrane Reviews. You can use RevMan for protocols and full reviews. It allows you to prepare the text, build the tables showing the characteristics of studies and the comparisons in the review, and add study data. It can perform meta-analyses and present the results graphically.

Select a Software

"Breakdown of the 22 software packages designed to support evidence syntheses, with the functionality to support different stages of the systematic review process". Source: Kohl, C. et al. Online tools supporting the conduct and reporting of systematic reviews and systematic maps: a case study on CADIMA and review of existing tools. Environmental Evidence 7, 8 (2018).

De-duplication

Since you are searching multiple databases you will have duplicate records in your results. You will want to remove the duplicates as far as possible before screening so that you won’t have to screen the same records twice. Reference management and systematic review software often have semiautomatic de-duplication options.

Make sure you keep a record of the total number of results and the number of results after de-duplication to enter into your PRISMA flow diagram.

Here are steps that you can follow to remove duplicates from your merged EndNote libraries: Deduplication in EndNote McGill University Libraries.