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Systematic Reviews: Software

Software overview

There are many software tools that can help you with different steps in the systematic review process.  There is a wide variety of price ranges and a few are free or at least offer a trial version for free. The SR Toolbox provides a comprehensive list but does not evaluate them for quality. 

Recommended Software

Covidence is a web-based program that coordinates screening and selection of studies; it generates a PRISMA flow diagram; creates risk of bias tables and study characteristic tables; It facilitates data extraction for export to RevMan. Android and iOS phone apps are available.  The library has a license for it available for MD Anderson. Click here to sign up. 

Rayyan is a web-based program that coordinates the selection of studies. It's easy to share with collaborators and includes a mobile app for screening studies on the go. It allows you to choose words to highlight in all citations to make it easier to scan titles and abstracts. Basic free versions are available.
SR-Accelerator is a free suite of tools that helps with many steps of the review process:  developing search strings, removing duplicate citations, screening, and more. 
EndNote is a great bibliographic management tool for systematic reviews.  You can use it to store, organize, and de-duplicate all the citations you collect from Medline, Cochrane, Embase, and other databases.  MD Anderson provides a desktop version of EndNote 8 to all staff but only for MD Anderson computers.  The Library has a help guide and several short online tutorials on how to use it. 
Excel is a basic tool that can be used to manage screening and data extraction. Customized workbooks and spreadsheets can be designed for the review process. The library uses it for recording search strings and tracking the numbers of citations found.
GRADEpro GDT free web-based software used to create Summary of Findings (SoF) tables for Cochrane systematic reviews.  
RevMan:  helps with protocol development, study selection, characteristics of studies tables, and writing Cochrane systematic reviews.