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Scoping Reviews in the Social Sciences

Deduplicating

Any time you search in multiple databases, you will get duplicate results. De-duplicating your results will be your next step. Keeping track of your numbers before and after deduplication is something you will want to note in your PRISMA diagram. There are many different tools that can help you with this step, but they all have their pros and cons.

  • Zotero - Zotero is a citation manager that is free and open source. It's deduplication tool is not perfect, but it allows you to bee very hands-on and will not remove anything it considers a duplicate unless you tell it to. How to do this in Zotero
  • Endnote (Clarivate): has a tool that searches for duplicate records. It's located under the Organize tool bar.
  • Screening tools - (such as Rayyan) They have deduplication abilities, but don't always catch all of them. You still may need to do some manual de-duplicating of records. Some also don't work as well with .RIS file uploads from some of the databases. (Recommended as secondary de-duplication)
  • Excel - this is the most hands-on option and many researchers like it because they control the full process. (Recommended as secondary, "by-hand" deduplication)
  • Dedupr- A free bibliographic deduplication app by Purdue. It's purpose is just to deduplicate. This is still in it's beta stage and only accepts RIS files at the moment. If a RIS file is not an option from the database you are searching, covert fie into RIS using Zotero and then upload here.

Study Selection

Once results have been deduplicated, you will begin the screening process.  The purpose of screening is to remove studies that are not ultimately related to your topic.  Researchers use their pre-defined inclusion/exclusion criteria to screen the titles/abstracts.  You may opt to use a screening tool to help with this process.

Article screening generally takes place in two stages

  • Start with a title and abstract screening to exclude those studies that are obviously outside of your parameters

  • The final stage will be full text screening. This is best performed by at least two screeners, screening independently from one another.

If reviewers disagree on whether studies should be included, at any stage in the process, disagreements can be resolved by consensus or via an expert third party (though this should be laid out ahead of time in the protocol).

*See below for info about the screening tool Rayyan or the Citation Management and Other tools tab for software suggestions to help with review process.

What are Screening Tools?

Screening results is a stage of the evidence synthesis process that comes after your systematic searching is complete. There are lots of tools available, both free and paid, for title/abstract and full text screening. This page highlights just one option, Rayyan, as an example. Rayyan does have paid plans, but the basic options are available for free. See a list of other options on the Citation Management & Other Tools tab.

What is Rayyan?

Rayyan is a user-friendly tool which enables a single person or a team to perform masked screening of references for evidence synthesis projects. It has some excellent features, especially if you're working with a large set of results. Rayyan is designed for screening, not for citation management or citing while writing! This is an optional tool which may speed up your screening process, and you would use it in conjunction with a citation management tool like Zotero.

Rayyan allows you to:

  • Highlight keywords to help you quickly identify important information in references.
  • Deduplicate records
  • Rapidly mark references for inclusion or exclusion, including labeling them with custom reasons.
  • Use machine learning and your existing screening decisions to sort unscreened items based on likely relevance.

To create your account, choose the Sign-Up link at the top of the page.

To test it out, select the Free account option and complete the sign-up process. Rayyan does offer subscriptions, but a free account may be sufficient for some people's needs. The library doesn't pay for institutional access.

Help with Rayyan?

Have questions about using Rayyan? Check out their help documentation! If you like to reduce your reliance on your mouse and speed up some processes, check out the list of keyboard shortcuts, too.

Recommended Workflow When Using Rayyan for Evidence Synthesis

A recommended workflow for using Rayyan for your screening process is as follows:

Rayyan claims to be compatible with the following text formats: EndNote Export (.enw), RIS, CIW, CSV and PubMed XML. Upload RIS files if possible.

  1. Collect all references.
  2. Record necessary numbers for your PRISMA diagram.
  3. Upload RIS files to Rayyan
  4. Deduplicate records
  5. Record number of references in deduplicated set.
  6. Complete all title/abstract screening.
  7. Record number of references in included set (if you found additional duplicates during title/abstract screening, be sure your numbers reflect this).
  8. Export included items to a new Rayyan project.
  9. Obtain full text of references and make available to screeners (a shared cloud storage folder outside of Rayyan is a good place to store full text for the team).
  10. Complete full text screening.
  11. Record final number of references included.
  12. Export included records into your preferred citation manager as a separate project library (RefWorks) or a Group Library (Zotero) to ensure they remain walled off from your original set of references and any other projects you're working on.

If you notice issues with citation exports

Some have found that exports from a number of databases fail to import successfully into Rayyan. They are constantly updating their product however. If you still experience this issue, to get around this problem, and to follow best practices for systematic and scoping reviews, we advise the following steps:

In your preferred citation management tool (such as Zotero):

  1. Collect all references.
  2. Record necessary numbers for your PRISMA diagram.
  3. Perform deduplication of references. 
  4. Record number of references in deduplicated set.
  5. Import the deduplicated set into a new Rayyan project.

In Rayyan:

  1. Complete all title/abstract screening.
  2. Record number of references in included set (if you found additional duplicates during title/abstract screening, be sure your numbers reflect this).
  3. Export included items to a new Rayyan project.
  4. Obtain full text of references and make available to screeners (a shared cloud storage folder outside of Rayyan is a good place to store full text for the team).
  5. Complete full text screening.
  6. Record final number of references included.
  7. Export included records into your preferred citation manager as a Group Library (Zotero) to ensure they remain walled off from your original set of references and any other projects you're working on.

Acknowledgement

Content on page has been adapted from University of Texas Arlington Libraries, Scoping Reviews Guide, and UCONN, Systematic Searching for Evidence Synthesis, CC BY-NC 4.0