Video: Tools for screening and organization (4:34 minutes)

Citation Management Background

Citation Management 

A citation management program will save you a lot of time when doing your evidence synthesis.  Programs like Endnote, Zotero or Mendeley will store and organize the citations collected during your screening, de-duplicate the results and automatically format in-text citations and bibliographies in your manuscript.

Visit Cornell's citation management webpage for a good overview of these programs.  You may download Zotero and Mendeley for free, while Endnote is freely available to members of the College of Human Ecology (click Software tab) and the College of Agriculture & Life Sciences.

For a very detailed comparison of these three major citation management tools, see this University of Maryland guide.

Citation Management Tips

Citation Management Tips

Once you've finished translating your search strategy to the syntax of each database you're searching, you will then: 

  1. Run the search in each database.
  2. Export the results as a BibTeX, MEDLINE, RIS, or XML file and save those files.
  3. Import those files into a citation management program.

 

Exporting Citations from PubMed to EndNote

  1. In your search results, click the “Save” button underneath the search bar.
  2. Under the  “Format” dropdown, select “PubMed”.
  3. Click “Create File” and a pubmed.txt file will be saved to your Downloads.
  4. In Endnote, go to “File” on the menu bar and navigate to “Import” → “File…”
  5. Choose the pubmed.txt file from your Downloads, and set the Import Option to “PubMed (NLM)”. Click “Import”.

De-duplication

De-duplication

You will likely retrieve multiple versions of the same study as you search many databases, and will need to de-duplicate your results before article screening. After you've performed your searches and imported the results into your citation management software:

  • In EndNote, from the menu bar select “Library” → “Find Duplicates”. You can select which of the duplicate records to keep by clicking “Keep This Record”. You can also keep both records by clicking “Skip”, which will cause the records to be added to a “Duplicate References” folder.
  • In Zotero, click on the "Duplicate Items" collection in your library. You can resolve duplicates by merging the files. 
  • In Mendeley, select your folder of interest. Go to your Tools menu and select "Check for Duplicates". Select the details that you would like to keep from each of the documents. Click merge to create one entry containing the complete document details.
  • Covidence also automatically de-duplicates your results. Click here for more information about Covidence de-duplication.