About Citation Managers for Evidence Synthesis

Citation managers are used to efficiently and easily collect, manage, and cite resources. Citation collections can be shared within a research team. And citation managers can be set up to back up to the cloud in case your computer fails.

Citation managers have historically been used for to increase the efficiency and organization of some steps of an evidence synthesis research project, and they are still frequently used.

There are multiple citation managers to choose from. Some examples include EndNote, Zotero, Mendeley, RefWorks, and more.  EndNote is the go-to choice for conducting an Evidence Synthesis research projects. However, Zotero is free and open source, so we will focus on Zotero.

Why are Citation Managers used for Evidence Synthesis?

Many research experiments or research projects collect, evaluate and synthesize data on human or animal research participants or subjects. These research projects gather and report data associated with the variables, outcomes and/or theories of interest using these human or animal participants. 

Evidence Synthesis 'participants' or 'subjects' are the reports of these research studies (aka articles and more that report on relevant variables, outcomes and/or theories). In other words, an Evidence Synthesis collects data, information and results from other available research projects.

Most Evidence Synthesis are comprehensive in nature. They therefore a include large amount of other research studies. For example, a well-formulated Systematic Review search of PubMed should yield 1,500 - 3,000 records on average. Evidence Synthesis involve in-depth processes for each of the following steps that are Transparently Documented. Citation managers help researchers to simplify, manage and document some of these processes.

• finding research records
• accessing research records
• managing research records
• evaluating research records
• synthesizing research records

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. Cite While You Write when writing up the final research report 
4. 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

Zotero: Setup and Use

For further information about how to set up and use Zotero citation manager,  see the following research guide pages:

1.  Installation
2. Saving citations 
3. Organizing your citations library 
4. Creating bibliographies

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