Basics of Systematic Reviews

The literature search for a systematic or scoping review will result in a large number of articles, studies, and other report types.  To manage the citations for these documents, it's important to use a citation manager for organization and de-duplication.  This involves:

1. Exporting all search results discovered in each selected database.
2. Uploading the citations of these results to your citation manager.
3. Removing duplicates of articles located in multiple databases.
4. Moving your article citations from the citation manager to your systematic review screening tool.

If you're not sure how to start this process, a librarian can help.

Systematic and scoping reviews require a large amount of articles to be exported and deduplicated in preparation for the screening process.  A citation manager should be used to expedite this step.  Citation managers are databases that allow you to store, organize, and share your research and citations.  UTSA has several free options available.  You can view our research guides on various citation managers and download the applications using your UTSA credentials through the below links.

For systematic reviews, EndNote is strongly recommended.  All UTSA faculty, staff, and students can download the EndNote software on multiple devices for free.

In addition to organizing and managing large numbers of citations, EndNote allows users to remove duplicate citations (this step can also be completed using a screening tool like Covidence or Rayyan).  For de-duplication instructions, see the "Deduplicating Your Library" section from the below UT Health San Antonio research guide: