Guide to Systematic Reviews & Meta-Analyses

Your team will likely be working mostly or entirely online.  Decide early which will be the best tools and platforms for the team you've assembled.  If you have external team members, a key factor in making your choices will be whether a specific tool is optimized for external users or not, e.g., Office 365 Calendar, Zoom enterprise version have limitations in this regard.

Working on Team Documents

Options include:
 

• Douglas College Teams platform  - encrypted, protected with multi-factor authentication and retains a rolling 30 days of file history.  CEIT will provide guest access to external team members upon request. 
   
  • Multiple people can edit a document at the same time - in the cloud platform only.  If you "download to desktop app" you will lock out all other collaborators until you save and close the file you're working on. 
    
     
• Google Docs - this non-proprietary platform is free and easy to use, with transparent version/file history.  Supports editing by multiple people at the same time - and users can view/identify who is making which changes in real time. 
   
  • However, this platform is not as secure as Teams and firewall issues may arise making it difficult to access while working on campus. 
     
  • Documents are only available in the cloud and features/functions are more limited than those available from MS Office tools.

Meeting platforms:

• Zoom: DC enterprise version - No time limit for meetings and meeting recordings are easily saved to the Cloud.  However,  non-College employees cannot have a DC guest account - which limits its utility for external members - e.g., they will not be able to schedule a meeting for the group nor edit/post a meeting recording. 
   
  • personal version - Free personal accounts have a 30 minute meeting time limit and unless you've decided to create a generic account with shared username and password only the account creator can schedule meetings. 
     
  • The free version  can only save recordings to your local computer, which you would then have to migrate to a suitable cloud location for asynchronous viewing. 
     
• Teams Meetings: built into the college Office 365 calendar tool - making it easy to set up meeting requests - provided everyone on the Team is a College employee.  If not, you'll need to use a third-party meeting scheduling tool to send out meeting requests.  See below for some popular options.

Meeting Scheduling Tools
 

3rd party options with a free, basic account / ideal if you have external team-members include: 
 

• Doodle
• Calendly
• Square
   

Douglas College Internal option:
 

• Office 365 Calendar

Two of the most popular, easy-to-use, and freely available tools for managing citations are:

Zotero:
 

• Available for Mac, Windows, Linux, and iOS.
   
• The first 300mb of storage is free; additional storage may be purchased by individuals on an annual subscription basis.
   
• Extensive help documentation is available to help users install and use all its features and functions.
   
• Other useful features include "word processor integration for Word, LibreOffice, and Google Docs and a built-in PDF reader (which) lets you mark up PDFs."

Mendeley:
 

• The free account comes with 2GB storage for personal documents; ability to create up to 5 groups of up to 25 collaborators for sharing common documents. 100MB limit for shared storage.
   
• Help Guides
   
• Quick User Guide
   
• FAQ

To learn more see our Guide to Citation Management Tools

Key Databases / Hosts

EBSCO Host:  provides a wide array of journal databases, including MEDLINE, CINAHL, ERIC, PsycINFO, and SocINDEX.
 

• To save specific articles, navigate to any EBSCO-hosted database and login using your CNA credentials. 
• If you are working on a campus computer and are not prompted to login,  click the "sign in" link at the top of the database landing page.
   
  • In order to save specific articles click the folder icon to the right of the article title
  • The "Folder" link at the top of your results screen now has items in it.  These remain in your folder until/unless you delete them.
  • Your folder will appear in any EBSCO database you log into
  • To export your folder contents simply click the Export link that appears when you click the Folder icon at the top of any EBSCO search page
     
• While you cannot export specific searches, you can save them for your records - both the search terms you used AND the results list:
   
  • When you have a search you'd like to save, click the "Search History" link directly beneath the search boxes
  • Check the box under the Search ID# link
  • Select "Save Searches / Alerts" which you'll find above the Delete Searches box
  • Add a Name to your search into the "Name of Search/Alert" box
  • Note: you have the option to permanently save your search, save it for only 24 hours or to create an alert out of your search terms.
     
    • If you choose to create an alert, EBSCO will send you an email about new content that fits your search criteria, based on frequency and publication date ranges you select.
       
  • Click save to go to your personal folder page which lists all your saved articles and searches
    
     

Ovid Platform:  Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews |  EBM (Evidence-Based Medicine Reviews) | MEDLINE
 

• To create an account for any/all of this Ovid-provided content, simply log in with your CNA, then click the "My Workspace" link in the top menu bar on the landing page.  Then click "Create Account."
   
• Ovid has a detailed help menu, but it's easiest to find the instructions on how to export your citations by typing "citations" into the help search box, then clicking "Exporting Results."
   
• Ovid also has an "Exporting Results" help video on YouTube
  
   

PubMed:  the U.S. National Library of Medicine's free MEDLINE database.  Although MEDLINE is also available through EBSCO and Ovid, some users prefer the PubMed interface. 
 

• To create a PubMed "My NCBI" account, you will need to have an account with and log in through one of a list of approved third-party "federated credential sites"
   
  • These include your Douglas College CNA as well as your Google, NIH, eRA Commons, ORCID, Login.gov account logins - if you'd prefer to use one of those options.
  • Click "more login options" to find Douglas in the A - Z list of login providers.

Rayyan: is an online platform that allows multiple users to download citations from a citation management tool; to de-duplicate citations/articles; and to make anonymous screening decisions based on your inclusion/exclusion criteria. 

• A free version of Rayyan is available, which supports 3 active reviews; unlimited reviewers; mobile app access and a 5 star relevance ranking system.
   
• Rayyan has a built-in import tool for Mendeley, but also supports importation from other tools, including Zotero, Google Scholar,  PubMed and ScienceDirect.

SR Toolbox from Systematic Review Tools is a tool search service, which allows you to find links to potentially useful tools for a wide array of review types, including systematic reviews, scoping reviews and reviews of reviews.  You can also limit to a specific stage-of-review, including data extraction, synthesis, reference management, and screening.
 

SRDR+ is "a free platform for extracting, archiving, and sharing data during systematic reviews and accessing shared data related to systematic reviews....(and also) helps build, customize, and share data extraction forms."  From the US Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. 
 

• Citations can be added manually, "fetched" from pubmed, and/or batch uploaded for RIS, CSV, and EndNote file formats.
   
• Extensive help guides & tutorials are available.