ESMARConf2023: The benefits of using R for systematic review reference management

Presenter: Emma Wilson
Authors: Wilson, Emma; Hair Kaitlyn; Macleod Malcolm
Session: Searching and record management 2
Title:
Abstract: Good reference management is essential when conducting systematic reviews or other evidence synthesis research. Many different reference management software programs are available to researchers, including Zotero, Mendeley, EndNote and Papers. However, reference management software can often struggle to handle large numbers of references, and the lack of version control means that changes made to references may not be recorded or reproducible. Many features of reference management software relevant to systematic reviews – such as importing references from databases searches, storing and organising references, filtering references, and retrieving full-text documents – can be performed using the R programming language. Additionally, changes made to references can be documented in a reproducible way using R scripts or RMarkdown files and GitHub. In this talk, I discuss how R can be used to effectively manage systematic review references, outline the benefits of using R to do so, and show examples from my own systematic review projects.