the logo of Lindexer, the literature review software.

Systematic Literature Review Software Buying Guide 

Choosing the Right Systematic Review Software

Systematic literature reviews provide a structured and methodological approach to scientific evidence synthesis. They are considered the gold standard in evidence-based medicine and are required in the clinical evaluation of medical devices and performance evaluation of in vitro diagnostics. However, they are also time-consuming and labor intensive. In combination with the increasingly large volume of evidence published each year, the need to increase the efficiency of this process by using software tools becomes more and more pressing. 

In this guide, we delineate: 

  • What systematic literature review software is. 
  • What benefits it brings. 
  • What to consider when selecting or evaluating a software system for conducting systematic literature reviews. 

What software tools are used in systematic literature reviews?

Generic software such as spreadsheets, word processing software and reference management software such as EndNote is still used for a large proportion of the systematic literature reviews, despite the availability of a (rapidly increasing) number of dedicated software systems specifically designed to conduct systematic literature reviews. 

A survey among members of the European Medical Writers Association conducted in the spring of 2023 revealed that at that time only 6% of respondents conducted systematic literature reviews using an automated process, whereas 35% used a partially automated process and 59% still used a fully manual process without specific software or tools for conducting literature reviews. [1] 

Of the respondents who used specific software tools for at least part of the literature review process, 47.5% used a commercially available desktop or self-hosted software package, 37.5% used a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform, whereas 15.0% used a custom or self-created tool or application. [1] 

What is systematic literature software?

Systematic literature review software solutions typically streamline the process of gathering, organizing, and analyzing large volumes of academic literature relevant to a specific research topic or question. They often offer features such as advanced search capabilities, automatic citation importing, categorization and tagging of articles, collaboration tools for team-based reviews, and visualization options to help researchers identify patterns and trends within the literature. Overall, systematic literature review software aims to enhance the efficiency and rigor of the literature review process by providing researchers with the necessary tools to manage and synthesize vast amounts of scholarly material. 

How systematic literature software can help you

Time is money

A systematic literature review tool should significantly reduce the time spent on a project, by automating some of the processes and reducing manual work. Additionally, such systems also have the capability to drastically reduce the time needed to analyze and report the data or update the review. 

Single Source of Truth

Perhaps the main benefit of systematic literature review software is bringing all steps of the systematic literature workflow together in a single system. This ensures that your entire systematic literature review is fully documented from search and selection, over appraisal and data extraction to reporting. This creates a transparent and repeatable process. 

Accuracy and traceability

To err is human, and copy/paste or data entry errors can happen easily in a spreadsheet. Using an integrated software system will e.g., prevent you from accidentally entering extracted data for the wrong publication. 

In addition to preventing errors, most software systems will include an audit trail of the review data to ensure traceability. 

Team collaboration

While spreadsheets hosted on online platforms such as SharePoint, Google Drive or Dropbox can be edited by more than one user at a time, it remains a risky process that often results in data conflicts.  

A systematic literature review software will allow team members to collaborate on the review seamlessly, allowing reduced turnaround times by working on different steps of the review in parallel. 

Security and compliance

Modern systematic literature review software systems are mostly SaaS platforms, hosting your systematic literature data in a secure cloud environment, taking care of backups and ensuring validation and regulatory compliance. 

Considerations for selecting systematic literature software

Successful selection and implementation of software requires a good understanding of your requirements: to select the best system you should consider what you want the software to achieve, what will be the main pain point it will solve for you, how and with how many people you will use it, what the return on investment will be and so on.  

This section guides you through a number of important considerations for selecting a systematic literature review software that will meet your needs and optimally support your workflow.  

Completeness of the software

Do you need the software to cover all steps of the systematic literature review workflow? Or is a tool that helps in screening and eligibility sufficient for you? Even when your initial answer to this last question may be yes, at least consider the impact and potential benefits of a system that supports the entire workflow now and in the future. The effort to implement a more complete system will be similar but the rewards in terms of efficiency and quality may be considerable. 

Can you search or import search results from all the literature databases that you need for your review? 

While screening may be the most time-consuming step due to high number of publications that need to be screened, when you are covering a domain in which an extensive body of published evidence is available, the next steps may also cost a considerable amount of time because they carry a higher workload per publication. And while the number of publications to appraise, summarize or extract quantitative data from will be considerably lower, these steps are nevertheless quite time consuming. 

Do not forget to take into account the time needed for retrieving and accessing the full texts, especially when – as often happens in literature reviews for medical devices or IVDs – a high percentage of publications is advanced to the full text stage because the device name is not mentioned in the abstract. 

As the number of papers published rapidly increases year over year, keeping a literature review current becomes increasingly important. So checking how the candidate software systems you consider are capable of handling living reviews and how your literature review can be updated and kept up to date becomes increasingly important. 

User friendliness and interface

The time intensive nature of systematic literature reviews will require many hours spent using the selected software. So selecting a system with a nice and responsive user interface that looks good and people enjoy working with is key. 

In particular, a well thought-out user interface is important due to the repetitive character of the work involved in a systematic review: the number of publications to screen and data items to extract can be huge. An extra click here and an awkward transition or some lag time there, can thus be major sources of frustration as well as time loss. Therefore, you want to select a system that is fast and responsive and supports these repetitive actions well without distracting users from the content of the literature they are working on. 

Customization and automation options

Is the software system you are evaluating of the one-size-fits-all type, or does it have options to customize it to the unique needs of your review and team?  

In addition to check whether customization options are present, it is also important to check whether they are easy or complex to implement, how time consuming setting up a systematic review is and whether your team can do this themselves or would need training or support to get started. Next, you also want to verify whether customizations can easily be reused. Does the system provide templates that are ready to use but can be adapted as needed and saved for later reuse, so you don’t need to reinvent the wheel for every new literature review? 

Does the software include automations, and does it use AI-assistance? Take care to check whether the AI- assistance makes any autonomous decisions or not and whether it complies with the EU Artificial Intelligence Act (Regulation EU 2024/1689) that has come into force on August 1st, 2024. [2] 

Reporting options

Can the system generate an accurate PRISMA flow chart to report the selection of studies? Can data be analyzed directly in the software, and can it make calculations such as derived parameters or unit conversions? 

What is the format of the reported or exported data? Is it usable as is for your reporting purposes or does it require extensive processing?  

When timelines are tight, a huge data dump that requires extensive processing and analysis is not very welcome when you see the deadline approaching and you thought to were almost at the finish line. Ideally, analysis and reporting options provide you with customizable datasets of specific parts of your review that you can directly use in your reporting, be it a literature review report for a clinical evaluation or research article. 

Can the software handle citations or export publications in a format that works with your preferred reference management application? 

Pricing model

Does the system have a free trial, so you can try out hands-on whether it meets the needs of your team, and whether you enjoy working with it? 

Also consider whether the pricing model is suitable for you and the size of your team. User-based pricing models can become quite costly when you have a large team and entails the risk of placing literature evidence in a silo whereas it could be valuable for many stakeholders if more generally accessible. 

Alternative pricing models included concurrent users, where you pay for the number of users who can use the system at the same time, or project-based pricing where you pay per project regardless of the number of users. These models make the literature evidence you are collecting much more widely accessible. 

Support & onboarding options

The quality of user documentation and the responsiveness of the user support are also items to consider. Is it a self-service platform or does it need to be configured for you (at an extra cost)? Does the provider have options to help you with implementing the software into your existing process? Lastly, you should consider whether you need the option to be able to import or migrate data from previous literature reviews into the system. 

Requirements checklist

Feel free to use our checklist with tons of features as a starting point for gathering the specific requirements of systematic literature software for your team. 

You can use the button below to download the form-fillable PDF for easier use. 

References and Reading

  1. Persy V. A survey on current use of software tools for systematic literature reviews. Med Writ [Internet]. 2023;32(3):48–54. Available from: https://doi.org/10.56012/lxrcb5395
  2. European Union. REGULATION (EU) 2024/1689 OF THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT AND OF THE COUNCIL of 13 June 2024 laying down harmonised rules on artificial intelligence. Off J Eur Union. 2024;1689(3):1–144.
Share This :

Register for a demo.

Pick the most convenient time for you from the following options below: