It is the nature of systematic reviews that you can generally expect to find large numbers of results, and it can therefore be very difficult to process these manually. Reference management software can help you manage and screen these results, and will be a very useful tool for several steps of your systematic review. Searching multiple databases means that it is very likely that you will have duplicate records in your results and these need to be identified. This can be done very easily using reference management software. You can also organise your included and excluded records, search and add PDF copies of original papers, and create and modify the bibliography in a quick and easy way.

The University of York specifically supports a reference management program called EndNote Desktop which has a number of features particularly useful for systematic reviews. More information about reference management software (including EndNote and its alternatives) can be found on our Reference management guide: