Specifically, the authors examined and compared two categories of de-duplication strategies: de-duplicating in the Ovid and EBSCO database platforms and de-duplicating in three selected reference management software packages: RefWorks, EndNote, and Mendeley.įive de-duplication options were examined in this study: The aim of this study was to explore and compare the effectiveness of various de-duplication features. Removing these duplicate citations, also known as de-duplication, can be a time-consuming process but is necessary to ensure a valid and reliable pool of studies for inclusion in a systematic review. As Kassirer and Angell argued, “multiple reports of the same observations can over emphasize the importance of the findings, overburden busy reviewers, fill the medical literature with inconsequential material, and distort the academic reward system”.

In addition, although many have called out against such practice, some authors “slice, reformat, or reproduce material from a study”, which creates repetitive, duplicate, and redundant publications. Also, due to the nature of the publishing cycle in the field of medicine, conference abstracts and full-text articles reporting the same information are often retrieved concurrently. Searching multiple databases, however, results in the retrieval of numerous duplicate citations.

The Cochrane Collaboration, for example, places a heavy emphasis on minimizing bias with a thorough, objective, and reproducible multi-database search, which has become the standard in systematic review processes. Because they are used as the foundation for clinical and policy-related decision-making processes, it is critical to ensure that the methods used in systematic reviews are explicit and valid. Systematic reviews continue to gain prevalence in health care primarily because they summarize and appraise vast amounts of evidence for busy health care providers.

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