Choosing the Best Systematic Literature Review Tools

CiteMed’s own platform is the strongest fit for medical device and pharma regulatory submissions specifically, with DistillerSR as the enterprise alternative for large teams that can absorb its cost and setup time. Excel and EndNote remain workable for smaller or occasional reviews. Below is the full comparison, including a feature table and named competitor breakdown.

We have performed 100s of literature reviews over the last few years across medical device and pharma. We’ve done them by hand, tested the systematic literature review software available on the market, and ultimately built our own. 

If you’re reading this, then you or your team have conducted systematic reviews and will again soon. 

Both Excel and EndNote have their place, and either can perform a systematic review if you have enough time and are careful with formulas and cell references. 

If you always have an ear to the ground about how to make a time-consuming systematic review process better, the mental math is straightforward: a 20% efficiency improvement compounds quickly across your team’s productivity. 

Why literature review software helps a CER writer specifically (added from the companion draft): efficient search and organization across databases without manual logging; easier collaboration when multiple reviewers or experts need to weigh in; automatic citation creation and management; faster data extraction and analysis, in some tools assisted by machine learning; and a structured screening process instead of tracking inclusion/exclusion by hand in a spreadsheet. 

The Breakdown of a Systematic Literature Review

A systematic review runs through nine steps, from picking search terms to producing an audit log an auditor can follow.

There are a lot of ways and different types of reviews one can perform on clinical literature. From meta-analysis, full on systematic reviews, to just pulling up some research articles on your drug/device to have some backup for a section in a document you’re writing.

Just so we’re speaking the same language, here’s an overview of our systematic review process. A video run through of this can also be watched here.

• Figuring out what you search (pick your terms, databases etc.)
• Determine the purpose of your review, your inclusion and exclusion criteria, research questions
• Running your searches and compiling all of the results
• Removing duplicates
• Reading through all the abstracts/titles and excluding articles that aren’t useful (with a reason!)
• Going out and collecting all of the full texts to read through
• Pulling out the useful information from each article. We call this data extraction.
• Compiling it all into tables that can be used in a report (Prisma, Summary of Search, Analysis Extraction Tables etc.)
• Producing an audit log of every decision you made, so that an auditor can easily follow your process (key word here is easily).

Phew, still with us? If you skimmed over these bullets and still are then you are probably nodding your head thinking your own process is more or less the same approach.

Now the only question left is… how long does your current systematic review process take you?

Time to Review – The Key Factor

An end-to-end systematic review commonly takes 40+ hours of focused review time, on top of a team’s other daily work.

In 8 years of constant phone calls, introductions and conferences, I’ve never met a bored regulatory or quality professional. Almost everyone is overworked (and underappreciated, but that’s for a different article).

As teams continue to stretch, and budgets continue to get slashed, companies have a renewed vigor for finding ways to maximize their existing staff. Long gone are the days of hiring armies of consultants to throw at intimidating projects.

It’s not secret that organizing and reviewing thousands of abstracts to distill into a useable report is a labor intensive task. And we aren’t at the point yet where an AI overlord can simply ‘handle it’ for you.

Time to review adds up. An end to end project might be 40+ hours of review time. That’s ‘focused’ review time, not in addition to 5 meetings a day, surprise audits and various fire fighting with your other product’s submissions.

The Hard To Measure Items

Mistakes, rework from scope changes, and revision cycles with clients add time to a review that isn’t captured by a simple hours estimate.

Not everything can be easily measured in minutes with a stop watch. What about risk of mistake? What about the time you spend redoing your summary tables because marketing wants to add a new indication so you had to append your search?

What about the back forth of revisions with your client (or manager), and having to make endless tweaks to your review to get the thing signed and submitted?

It’s tough out there the clinical evidence world, we know it.

For this intangibles, we only can draw from our own experience. The reviews, the heartache, the humanity! OK, it’s not usually that bad,, but you don’t want to be around when someone asks your team to pull up and update an old review that was buried under 2 years of emails, partial drafts and revision requests. Those were some dark days, at least before our tools took shape and started proving their mettle.

While not easy to quantify, these more ‘workflow’ related challenges can add exorbitant amounts of time onto a review cycle. In a future article, we’ll take a stab at quantifying these in a way that’s presentable.

How to Evaluate Software Tools for Systematic Reviews

Four questions matter most when evaluating a tool: does it do what you need, can you afford it, how long does onboarding take, and will documentation be a pleasure or a pain to maintain?

Evaluating new software can be a massive pain, especially for an already overloaded team. Alas, it must be done if you’re to have any hope of freeing up additional time and boosting productivity. As someone who’s reviewed hundreds of products across all kinds of industries, I can help you out with a buyer’s checklist to make your evaluation process as painless as possible.

When evaluating tools, it helps to compare them against a structured framework — [read our guide to the best systematic literature review software].

Does this tool do Everything I need It To?

Obvious question first, but you’d be surprised how many folks will start their search for new products without being able to articulate how they’re currently solving the problem. If you have a few extra weeks handy to go back and forth on ‘discovery calls’ so that vendors can figure out what you’re doing, great. If you don’t have the time and want to greatly speed up the buying process, have some ready-to-share documentation from the start.

Most of the time if you come with a checklist of features/functions, a single call (or even trip to a good website) is all it will take to figure out if there’s any hope of a product being able to work for you.

Do We Have the Budget for This?

Not always the easiest thing to find out, as a lot of enterprise companies will try and make you sit through 2-3 calls before sharing even the most basic of pricing numbers. For this I have two recommendations:

• Shop around online, and use your referral network to get some ideas of pricing (chances are someone in your network has used the product before).
• Insist on at least a basic idea of pricing on your first demo call. If you can give a rough range of users needed, and your use case the sales rep should be able to at least give you a pricing range of what costs could look like. Don’t waste your time on a second call if your budget is 1/10th what an average contract looks like.

Is the On-boarding Process Simple, or an Intrusive Pain?

Another little detail that’s conveniently forgotten by many a software-salesperson is how long it will take to get you and your team set up and actually using the product. Some systematic review tools (like Endnote) you can download and start using immediately. Others (like DistillerSR from evidence partners), can take weeks of meetings, infrastructure set-up/testing, and workflow cross-training calls.

Both scenarios have their pro’s and cons, weight this factor according to your team set-up.

Will this be a nightmare or a pleasure to maintain documentation for?

There’s nothing like spending months implementing a new tool and training your team only for the majority to leave the company after holiday bonus season. Will it be a snap to get your new hires up to speed and using the shiny new software tools you purchased? Or will you be back to square one with training and knowledge transfer?

Some software tools are designed to be intuitive, with beautifully written suites of documentation and ‘plug and play’ SOPs to re-use within your organization. Many software tools are not at all. If your workflows are based around common knowledge tools like Excel, this is far less of a concern.

Components of Incredible Systematic Review Software 

Six features separate a real systematic review tool from a general research tool: systematic-review-specific support, data extraction, reference management, streamlined screening, collaboration, and protocol development. 

The research world is full of different and interesting tools that support a variety of research methods. If your goal is truly to conduct systematic reviews, some tools will be far more useful than others that still fall under the research category. 

• Does it support systematic reviews specifically, as distinct from a meta-analysis or a general ‘literature review’? 

• Data extraction features: pulling safety, performance, and population data out of the full text of the article and into a usable table. 

• Reference management: what happens to the literature after the review is complete, so the next update doesn’t mean re-buying the same full texts. 

• An intuitive, streamlined screening process, rather than tracking hundreds of abstracts in a spreadsheet. 

• Collaboration features, so your team can see and work on the same review together. 

• Protocol development: the ability to manage and create a search protocol that parallels the review, which is critical for regulatory submissions and for a notified body or auditor to replicate your process. 

The Competitors: Systematic Review Tools 

Six tools are compared here: Citavi, DistillerSR, Excel, Medboard, EndNote, and CiteMed’s own platform, each with its own pros and cons below. 

In this article, we compare the most prevalent tools for systematic literature review with our own solution, CiteMed.com. Any medical writer with experience in the field has likely used one or more of the tools below, so this comparison is meant to answer a common question directly: is switching to a dedicated tool worth the cost and effort? 

Disclaimer: not all of these tools we have used personally in our workflows. A lot of the feature-based info was pulled from marketing materials, and the pros/cons through survey-based data from our network of medical writers. 

Citavi 

Citavi is a reference manager, in the same realm as Endnote and not a true systematic review tool. But we mention it here as it’s found a way into many a clinical team’s internal processes. 

• Pros: been around a long time, refined and familiar interface; reasonable pricing for individuals and teams. 

• Cons: not set up for systematic reviews at all; no real time-saving features built in. 

DistillerSR from Evidence Partners 

Distiller is one of the biggest names in the systematic review industry. Being around a long time, and having a large team, they’ve parlayed great experience into a very robust enterprise solution. 

• Pros: industry leading and largest; robust platform for data extraction and systematic reviews with AI and machine learning features; very customizable for large teams and implementations. 

• Cons: leading in costs and expenses for license fees, cost prohibitive for medium/small orgs; long learning curve and heavy lift to get set up for your own workflows. 

Excel 

There’s not much you can’t do with Excel if given enough time and vlookup statements, so for those experienced it’s a completely viable form of performing a systematic review… mostly. 

• Pros: cost (free with Office); customization (if you can dream it, you can build it in Excel, though the result won’t be pretty). 

• Cons: mistakes and audit trails (easy to accidentally copy/paste in the wrong place or delete a cell unnoticed, and very difficult to prove clean at audit time); maintainability (shared spreadsheets with thousands of citations, growing year after year, quickly become unwieldy). 

Medboard Systematic Reviews 

Medboard has a strong team and has built a well-regarded regulatory intelligence product along with a solid systematic review tool. 

• Pros: literature solution integrated into a regulatory intelligence platform; great founders, well-run company. 

• Cons: enterprise pricing models; not designed to support individuals or freelancers. 

EndNote – Citation Manager for SLR 

An old challenger to Excel, EndNote is old and (more or less) reliable; you’d be hard pressed to find a medical writer who doesn’t spend a good deal of time manipulating citations in it. 

• Pros: workflow integration, since most writers already use EndNote daily; strong exports and cite-while-you-write into Word. 

• Cons: team collaboration and shared research libraries are not simple; lacks systematic features, so tracking screening progress still requires exporting into Excel. 

CiteMed.com – Full Service Systematic Review Software 

CiteMed’s own systematic review platform is the newest tool in this comparison, at 6 years old. It was designed from the ground up by our team of medical writers, who perform CERs and literature reviews, to make the review process as smooth as possible. 

• Pros: a streamlined solution for lit review that took years to perfect; sharing and collaboration are built in, with citation libraries fully backed up and accessible, and EndNote import/export still available if you want it. 

• Cons: inertia and training, since it’s still a new tool to integrate into your team’s process, even though onboarding a new project takes only minutes; fitting into an already entrenched workflow can be difficult if your team needs an exact 1-to-1 match to your existing process. 

The Results: Feature Comparison 

CiteMed and DistillerSR support the most systematic-review-specific features; Excel and EndNote require more manual assembly to reach the same result. 

(Note: Citavi and Medboard are discussed above but omitted from this table since we don’t have verified feature-level data on file for them.) 

So What Is the Best Systematic Literature Review Tool? 

CiteMed and DistillerSR are the two enterprise-ready options built specifically for systematic review audit trails; Excel and EndNote remain the right call for smaller, occasional reviews. 

Our own CiteMed.com tool is built to move faster than the ‘best practices’ most teams default to, on time efficiency and accuracy, but that doesn’t mean it’ll be the right fit for your team and workflows. Both Excel and EndNote have their place, which is why they are used so widely. 

In the enterprise space, there are several players that might fit your needs. DistillerSR continues to be the choice for complex workflows and large teams despite its price tag, and Medboard has brought a nice tool and feature set to the table in pairing with its regulatory intelligence platform. 

No matter what you decide, if you’re performing systematic reviews at all, you should be evaluating a more sophisticated tool set. The time savings, and error reduction, are typically worth the upfront set up and training pains. 

The Top Tools for Systematic Reviews, In Summary 

The right tool depends on budget and review volume: CiteMed for teams running reviews regularly, EndNote for occasional ad hoc reviews, Excel for zero budget, and enterprise platforms for large, complex workflows. 

• If you want to maximize time saved doing literature reviews and manage multiple projects/citations with your team: consider CiteMed.com. 

• If you are only occasionally performing ad hoc reviews to support other medical writing tasks: stick with EndNote for easy cite-while-you-write features. 

• If you have no budget for tools or time to improve your team’s workflow: Excel may be your best bet to maintain continuity without extra spend. 

• If you have budget and a significant, complex organizational workflow: enterprise-ready solutions like CiteMed, DistillerSR, or Medboard are your best bet to compare in more depth. 

FAQ 

What is the best systematic literature review tool for a clinical evaluation report? 

CiteMed and DistillerSR are the two options in this comparison built specifically for audit-trail-ready systematic reviews, meaning every screening decision is timestamped and documented well enough for a notified body to follow after the fact. CiteMed is designed around medical device and pharma regulatory workflows specifically, including automatic search protocol generation across 7 databases and submission-ready Word outputs. DistillerSR is the broader enterprise standard, with a larger installed base and AI-assisted extraction, but its setup and training process commonly takes weeks rather than the minutes-to-hours it takes to onboard onto CiteMed. 

Is there a free option for systematic literature review software? 

Not among the dedicated review tools compared here. EndNote offers a 30-day license trial, and Excel is included with any Office license, so both can serve as a no-added-cost starting point for a smaller or occasional review. Neither was built for systematic review screening specifically, though, so you’re trading cost for manual audit-trail work: with Excel or EndNote, you’re responsible for tracking inclusion and exclusion decisions and de-duplication yourself, rather than having the tool do it automatically. 

Do these tools replace a reference manager like EndNote? 

Not always. CiteMed and Citavi include built-in citation management, so they can fully replace a separate reference manager. DistillerSR does not include one, which is why many DistillerSR users still run EndNote alongside it purely for citation formatting and Word integration. If citation management matters to your workflow, check this specifically before committing to a tool, since retrofitting a second tool after the fact adds real overhead. 

How long does it take to get a team set up on a new systematic review tool? 

It varies widely by tool. CiteMed and EndNote can be usable within minutes to a day, since neither requires custom workflow configuration to start a review. DistillerSR implementations commonly take weeks of meetings, infrastructure setup, and workflow cross-training calls for larger teams, according to the vendor’s own onboarding process. Budget for this setup time separately from the license cost when comparing tools, since a cheaper license with a longer setup time can end up costing more in staff hours before the first review even starts.