Research Guides: Systematic Reviews & Other Review Types: Systematic Review Tools

Directories

General Tools

Helpful for multiple stages of the review process.

DistillerSR
Free student program available & discounted faculty program.
Covidence
Only the trial version is free. Helpful for screening through data abstraction.
Review Manager or RevMan
PICO Portal
First review is free

Specific Tools for Planning the Review

Reporting Guidelines: Not sure what to report in your review, locate a reporting guideline.

Campbell Collaboration Equity Checklist for SR Authors
A tool for authors who are considering equity or studying disadvantaged populations in their review.

Protocol Registration: A first step to organize the review and prevent bias is creating and registering a protocol.

PRISMA-P extension Statement-Guidance for creating protocols
PredicTER tool
Predict how long your review will take.
Methods Wizard
A tool that helps with writing the systematic review protocol using semi-automation
PROSPERO
Designed as a registry for systematic reviews or meta-analysis and it is free to search what reviews have been registered and to register a protocol.
OSF or Open Science Framework
A free and open-source cloud based research management platform to researchers to store files and data & register preprints.
SYREAF protocols/registration
Systematic Reviews for Animals & Food
Joanna Briggs Institute Systematic Review Register
Campbell Collaboration-Register a protocol

Organizing & Collaborating with a Team: Teamwork is core to the systematic review.

Trello
Workep
Conceptboard
Google drive-Create a shared drive
Loom Video
Free for small teams, may require a subscription for larger teams. This is a team communication tool.

Tools for Literature Searching

Not interested in conducting your own search? You may use our systematic review search service instead!

PubMed Pub ReMiner
Text mining for PubMed
Yale MeSH Analyzer or Analyze MeSH
MeSH on Demand
Identifies MeSH terms in your submitted text (abstract or manuscript) and lists similar articles.
Medline Transpose
Translate a search query between Ovid MEDLINE and PubMed syntax
Litsearchr
Shinyapps version of Litsearchr (no coding)
SWIFT-Review
Text mining tool specific to systematic reviews.
Polyglot Search
Helps to translate search strategies to other database (excluding subject headings).
SnowGlobe
Assists with literature searching, using the snowballing (searching through reference lists) technique. OSF demonstration available in OSF at https://osf.io/jth83/.
Voyant
General text mining (this is the download) for the web version go to http://voyant-tools.org
TERMINE
General text mining
JSTOR Text Analyzer
Recommends journal articles in JSTOR relevant to text.
Oxford English Dictionary
May be useful to locate additional terms or synonyms.
Visuwords
A visual dictionary and thesaurus
Citationchaser
An R package for forward and backward citation chasing in academic searching.
Scite
Easily check how a scientific article has been cited and if its findings have been supported or contrasted by others.
RCT Tagger
Helps identify human randomized controlled trials
Connected Papers
Enter a paper and it will build a graph of similar papers in the field.

Citation Managers & Deduplication Software

Mendeley
Zotero
Endnote Online
Note: the desktop version is more robust for deduplication (subscription fees apply)

Tools for Screening

Did you know screening includes 2 or more reviewers and must be done independent and blinded from the other reviewer(s)?

Rayyan
Rayyan-a Guide for Researchers (Temple University Libraries)
Abstrackr
Semi-automated screening using machine learning.
Sysrev
Helps facilitate screening, collaborative extraction of data from academic articles and abstracts, PDF documents, and uses machine learning. The free platform supports open access/public projects only. Fee for privacy settings.
RobotAnalyst
RobotAnalyst is designed for searching and screening reference collections obtained from literature database queries. It combines search engine functionality with machine learning and text mining.
ASReview
Utilizes active learning
Colandr
Machine learning, natural language processing, and text-mining functions to partially automate screening.
DistillerSR (free with student program)
Includes AI feature to help rank screening. Predict screening time with time averages.
SyRF
Screening tool for in-vivo or preclinical studies from CAMARADES for systematic reviews of animal data from experimental studies
revtools
revtools is an R package to support researchers working on evidence synthesis projects.

Data Extraction

Overview of data extraction tools-Chart
What data to collect and tools (Cochrane Handbook 2019)
SRDR+
Free data extraction/management tool
SRDR+ course module
Systematic Review Data Repository (SRDR)
tool for the extraction and management of data for systematic review or meta-analysis. It is also an open and searchable archive of systematic reviews and their data
REDCap
No cost for Temple Health, build online surveys and databases quickly and securely.
RAx (30 day free trial, discounted subscription for students)
Smart assistant to explore, collate insights and organize research.
AirTable
This is a cloud-based spreadsheet/database hybrid. It is free or by subscription for more advanced features. It has many uses beyond systematic reviews.

DistillerSR (free with student program)
Create customizable templates for data abstraction or choose from a template. Gives you full control of your data.
Robot Reviewer
It automatically extracts and synthesises data from Randomized Controlled Trials by dragging and dropping PDFs or by uploading the files.

Plot Digitizer
A java program that can extract data from graphs and is available as a free download.
Grade Pro
Helps create the SoF Summary of Findings Table and incorporating the GRADE Approach to help make recommendations of the level of evidence.

Tools for Meta-Analysis

DistillerSR Forest Plot Generator from Evidence Partners
Meta Essentials
The tool consists of a set of workbooks designed for Microsoft Excel.
MetaLight
Is a software application designed to support the teaching and learning of meta-analysis.
Metafor
The metafor package is a free and open-source add-on for conducting meta-analyses with the statistical software environment R.
OpenMeta[Analyst]
Completely open-source, cross-platform software for advanced meta-analysis.
OpenMEE
Open-source software for performing meta-analysis suited to the need of ecologist and evolutionary biologists.
Statistical software discounts for Temple University

Tools for Writing

RevManHAL
An extension to RevMan-to automate the writing of systematic reviews (created by the Cochrane Collaboration Schizophrenia Group).
GradeProof
Automated high-quality spelling, grammar and rephrasing corrections using artificial intelligence (AI) to improve the flow of your writing. Free and subscription plans available.

Tools for Creating Risk of Bias Figures

robvis
Web app designed for visualizing risk-of-bias assessments.

The tool creates: “traffic light” plots of the domain-level judgements for each individual result; and weighted bar plots of the distribution of risk-of-bias judgements within each bias domain.