Software for organising and screening abstracts following a literature search with a large number of papers:
- Rayyan QCRI: a free web application to help systematic review authors perform their job in a quick, easy and enjoyable fashion. Authors create systematic reviews, collaborate on them, maintain them over time and get suggestions for article inclusion. Rayyan also has a mobile app. With this app, you can screen your reviews on the go such as while you are riding the bus. You can even use the app while offline; once connected, the app will automatically sync back to the Rayyan servers.
- Covidence: a primary source screening and data extraction tool for Cochrane authors, streamlining the production of standard intervention reviews. Covidence’s support of key steps in the Cochrane Review process, such as citation screening and Risk of Bias assessment, and improved links with RevMan can make the review writing process more efficient. It is not free unfortunately, but a Trial subscription allows the screening of up to 500 records.
- Abstrackr: a free abstract screening tool, which is very simple and does not provide many tools beyond abstract screening. After deciding which papers to include based on reading the abstract, you will have to export the records and then use another tool later on. However this is very fast and has a simple web interface that you can use on laptops, tablets and mobile devices. Abstract screening is quick with this tool.
- DistillerSR: a systematic review software that manages, tracks, and streamlines the screening, data extraction, and reporting processes of systematic reviews and literature reviews. Similar to Covidence in that it has a trial subscription but payment is required for more extensive work.
- metagear: as with most other tasks, there is an R package for this! Pros: FREE, Cons: one needs to code and know R.