Managing Records

Typical yield for reviews with a comprehensive search methodology are > 1000 records, It is important to have a strategy for managing citations at the beginning of the project. Programs listed on this page may be useful for storing, organizing, tracking, and formatting records.

Citation Management Programs

EndNote Desktop
Desktop citation management program is available for all UI graduate students, faculty, and staff.
Endnote Basic
EndNote Basic is the web-based version of the EndNote citation manager software that is freely available for anyone affiliated with the University of Iowa. The tool allows automatic import of citations, and offers features for organizing and formatting citations.
Mendeley
[Free] Mendeley makes it easy to keep your collection of PDFs organized. It takes PDFs, extracts author/title/source information, renames and organizes them, and syncs them to free online storage space. It also includes a PDF reader that allows highlighting and annotations.
Zotero
[Free] Zotero is free plug-in for Mozilla Firefox. It allows you to import and organize citations as well as attach PDFs from your computer. Citations and PDFs can be synced to a free online Zotero account. A Word plug-in allows citations to be inserted into your paper and formatted.

EndNote Style for Exporting Records to Excel

Tab delimited with abstracts
To save this file to your EndNote account, open it with EndNote and then do a Ctl + S (or Mac equivalent).

Follow these steps to export your records:

Select references->right click & select Copy Formatted
Open Excel>Paste

This style is set up to export the following fields into Excel columns as listed below

A –Authors B– Year C– Article Title

D– Record # E– Journal F– Volume

G– Issue H- Pages I- Abstract

If more information is needed on customizing a style, contact your subject librarian.

De-Duplication of Records

Using software to identify duplicate records should be done carefully. The following article evaluates 5 options for removing duplicate records, detailing the number of false positive and false negative results: Kwon Y, Lemieux M, McTavish J, Wathen N. Identifying and removing duplicate records from systematic review searches. Journal of the Medical Library Association: JMLA. 2015;103(4):184-8.

Relying on the Find Duplicates function in EndNote to remove duplication is often not satisfactory for systematic reviews. The following article describes in detail how to change settings in EndNote and remove duplicate records efficiently and effectively: Bramer WM, Giustini D, de Jonge GB, Holland L, Bekhuis T. De-duplication of database search results for systematic reviews in EndNote. Journal of the Medical Library Association: JMLA. 2016;104(3):240-3.