Systematic Review and Evidence Synthesis

You will likely retrieve multiple versions of the same reference from the different databases you search. Deduplication of your results will be necessary before article screening. You can use citation management software or tools for evidence synthesis like Covidence or the IEBH SR-Accelerator Deduplicator to deduplicate.

Citation managers

After you've performed the searches for all of your databases, import the results into your citation management software.

Endnote

• From the menu select Library > Find Duplicates. Select which duplicate record to keep by selecting Keep This Record.

Zotero

• Select the Duplicate Items collection in your library. You can resolve duplicates by merging the files. 

Covidence

• Covidence automatically de-duplicates your results. Click here for more information about Covidence de-duplication.

SR-Accelerator Deduplicator

Researchers at Bond University’s Institute for Evidence-Based Healthcare created a tool for deduplication that works with EndNote but which  has greater sensitivity and specificity than EndNote's built-in function. You will need to export your library of references from EndNote in XML. The Deduplicator tool then sorts the references into four groups, based on increasing likelihood of duplication, for you to make final decisions.

• Deduplicator

  • Help using Deduplicator

McKeown, S., & Mir, Z. (2021). Considerations for conducting systematic reviews: Evaluating the performance of different methods for de-duplicating references. Systematic Reviews, 10(1), 38. https://10.1186/s13643-021-01583-y