Best reference management software
- Hours of extraction
- 15.1
- Cells in the matrix
- 252
- Cells done twice
- 50
Every figure on these worksheets is one you typed. Where a page states something outside your own review, it names the document it came from and the day it was read.
Best reference management software is the wrong question asked slightly too early, because reference managers are close enough to each other that the answer is usually whichever one your co-authors already use. The question worth spending an evening on is what your review needs that a reference manager does not do at all: screening two people at once, a reason on every exclusion, and an extraction table that is not a spreadsheet nobody else can open. This page is about telling those two layers apart before you pay for either.
Open the Literature review matrix Free to use. No account, no card, no trial clock.
Settle the reference manager on compatibility, not features
Whatever your supervisor, your co-authors and your library support is the right one, because the cost of being the only person on a different tool is paid every single time you share anything. Export formats matter more than the interface.
Ask what happens to an exclusion
Take any candidate tool and try to record why one specific paper was excluded, then find that reason again from a different screen. Some tools have no field for it at all, and that absence is the whole difference between the two layers.
Price it against the length of the review, not the month
A review runs for months and then stops. Multiply the seat price by the months you expect to be screening and extracting, and compare that against the hours the tool has to save you, which the worksheet on this site works out from your own numbers.
Will the Best reference management software hold how your review is run?
The worksheets need no account, so there is nothing to book a demo for. This form is for the questions they cannot answer: whether Pro holds a particular thing, how a review already half done would come across, or what is missing that you need.
What reviewers ask about the Best reference management software
Do I need review software as well as a reference manager?
Only once two things are true: the record set is big enough that screening is a project rather than an afternoon, and somebody other than you will need to see why records were excluded. Below that, a reference manager and a carefully kept spreadsheet genuinely work, which is why the worksheets on this site are free and need no account.
Which reference manager should I use?
The one your collaborators and your library already use. They differ in sync, in PDF handling and in price, and they do not differ in the thing that matters here: none of them holds a screening decision or a reason for exclusion, so the choice does not affect what this product is for.
How do I judge whether a tool is worth its licence?
Work out the screening hours first. The worked example on this site takes 412 records to 321 unique, 58 full texts and 28 included, which is a little over 24 hours of screening; a $19 a month tool across six months is $114, so it has to save under five hours a year to be worth the money. Do that sum with your own numbers before reading any feature list.