Using Rayyan for Systematic Reviews

When searching multiple databases to conduct a review, you will almost inveitably end up with duplicate references. There is differing advice online about whether to use another program, such as EndNote, to deduplicate references or use the built-in deduplication function in Rayyan. I recommend using Rayyan's built-in duplicate detection (but not the beta auto-deduplication feature available for paid accounts). McKeown and Mir (2021) found that Rayyan was better at identifying likely duplicates than the built-in capabilities of reference managers EndNote, Mendeley, and Zotero.

McKeown, S., & Mir, Z. M. (2021). Considerations for conducting Systematic Reviews: Evaluating the performance of different methods for de-duplicating references. Systematic Reviews, 10, Article 12. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13643-021-01583-y

Video by Carrie Price, Towson University Libraries

1. Under My Reviews, select your review and click the Show button.

2. Click the Detect duplicates button on the top right of the review page.

3. You will see the message "This will clear all duplicate resolutions you have made till now (except Deleted.) Click OK to continue.

4. Under Possible Duplicates on the left side of the page, click Unresolved.

5. Click the reference you want to resolve.

6. Click Resolve duplicate in the lower panel. Rayyan will now display the original reference and any references it suspects are duplicates. A single reference can have multiple (>2) duplicates.

7. If the references are duplicates, select Delete for each duplicate record you want to remove from the review. (If you accidentally delete a reference, try this workaround to restore it.)

8. If the references are not duplicates, select Not duplicate for each record that is unique.