Considerations for conducting systematic reviews: a follow-up study to evaluate the performance of various methods for electronic reference deduplication

Our research team previously examined the performance of default algorithms for removing duplicate references via OvidSP multifile search, EndNote X9, Mendeley desktop, Zotero, Covidence, and Rayyan (doi.org/10.1186/s13643-021-01583-y). Since then, Mendeley desktop is no longer available for download and has been replaced with Mendeley Reference Manager (which currently does not offer the ability to deduplicate references), EndNote has released newer versions of its desktop app, ProQuest RefWorks revamped their deduplication feature, Systematic Review Assistant – Deduplication Module was replaced by a new “Deduplicator” tool, as part of the suite of automation tools in Systematic Review Accelerator, and Deduklick, a standalone deduplication tool, was released (4).

The objective of this study was to examine the performance of default settings for electronic reference deduplication in EndNote online classic, EndNote 20, ProQuest RefWorks, Deduklick, and Systematic Review Accelerator’s Deduplicator.