3 minutes talk presentation support at the European Association for Health Information and Libraries (EAHIL) conference in Lodz (Poland) in June 2025

The video has no audio as it was used as it replaced a slidedeck and was live commented (transcription below).

Hi, my name is Raphaël. I'm a librarian at the Lausanne University Hospital, in Switzerland, and I going to talk about Zotero for systematic reviews.

You may already know that you can use tags to describe publications and gather references in smart collections based on an saved search. This is for instance useful to identify the gold set articles you miss with your first search strategy. Using tags and smart collections, you can create a workflow within Zotero to help you document and report your search strategy.

You also know that there are a lot of plugins that provide you with additional functionalities.

Now I want to show 3 tips that you can use during a systematic review.

First, Zotero can help you identify new keywords when you develop your search strategy. If you select all the results, you can use a script to extract all the tags, so you can sort them by number of occurrence. This way, it's quick and easy to scroll through the most used keywords and choose the ones you may add to your search strategy.

Second, you can use tags to keep track of source databases. After you saved the results in a collection, you can use the Actions & Tags plugin to add a tag to record from what database the reference comes from.

Third, you can convert Rayyan labels into Zotero tags. Let's take the screened results exported from Rayyan. The decision is stored in a note, but it would be better to have tags for that. Actions & Tags can do that as well. This way it's easier to identify and count the excluded records gathered in a smart collection, for instance.

Zotero is free and open source. This means users can help improve the software. If something is missing, you can help to add it. Scripts you can use in Actions & Tags are provided by Zotero users. To test a script, you just need to copy and paste the code, and follow the instructions. Actions & Tags is only one of the many plugins available for Zotero. One of them even helps you manage other plugins.

If you want to know more on that topic, get in touch with me. Thank you for listening.