Evidence Syntheses (Scoping, systematic, & other types of reviews)

It is not unusual to collect thousands of articles as a result of your literature searches.  Citation management software, such as EndNote, Mendeley, or Zotero, are useful in the evidence synthesis process because they help you to easily: 

• collect & organize references from a variety of databases &
• check for duplicate citations. (It is important during an evidence synthesis to not count duplicate articles.)
  • This can also be done in a screening program such as Covidence.

Find more information about citation management tools in this research guide.

We strongly recommend that you export the citations from your citation management tool into an evidence synthesis tool that is designed to support advanced literature review workflows, including article screening.

Popular evidence synthesis tools with screening features include:

• DistillerSR (subscription required)
• Covidence (U-M site-wide license available)
• Rayyan (free and subscription options available)
• Abstrakr (free)

Select the best tool for your team by considering your team's needs and comparing features, usability, and costs of various tools.

Recent Tool Evaluations

• Harrison H, Griffin SJ, Kuhn I, Usher-Smith JA. Software tools to support title and abstract screening for systematic reviews in healthcare: an evaluation. BMC Med Res Methodol. 2020;20(1):7. Published 2020 Jan 13. doi:10.1186/s12874-020-0897-3
• Kohl C, McIntosh EJ, Unger S, Haddaway NR, Kecke S, Schiemann J, Wilhelm R. 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. 2018 Dec;7(1):1-7. doi:10.1186/s13750-018-0115-5

The Taubman Health Sciences Library is pleased to provide a site-wide Covidence license for use by University of Michigan affiliates. See the Covidence Review Software page for more information.

The Covidence Knowledgebase contains brief videos and how-to articles on Importing references and Exporting data, including:

• How to import references
• How to bulk upload PDFs
• How to manage duplicates
• How to export study lists to your reference manager

For more information on U-M's Covidence license, please see the Covidence Review Tool page of this Evidence Syntheses Research Guide.