Conducting a systematic review typically involves multiple people, extensive time periods and lots of opportunity for things to be forgotten, stored in multiple locations, and potentially lost.
So part of being organised isn't just about managing your time, or giving out tasks to different members of the review team, it also involves the management and organisation of the references at every stage of the process. So the references that were found in your initial search, the duplicates you removed, the papers you sought to retrieve as full text documents, any papers removed from that collection and, finally, the papers you will refer to in your piece of work.
There's a lot to keep an eye on, to keep organised, so it's important to use a good tool which has been designed for that purpose. A reference management tool is a piece of software that can take a lot of the 'heavy lifting' out of managing your references / papers. This doesn't mean that the software is perfect, and that errors can't happen (always backup regularly!) but they are a key way of organising your references. They also have the added benefit of making it easier to remove duplicates, fill out the PRISMA flow diagram, and store the PDF of papers you've gained access to through databases.
Many reference management tools also give you the option of using a 'cite while you write' add-on for your Word (or sometimes Open Office) software. This allows you to pull all of the reference information across to your document as you're writing it and this will ensure that your referencing is consistent across the different types of documents you may be citing.
It is strongly recommended that you use a reference manager if you're doing higher level study and definitely if you're conducting a systematic review in order to stay organised and to provide evidence to the team (and possibly peer reviewers) of papers found, discarded, and used.
There are a number of free reference managers that you can sign up for which will give you access to the key tools of storing references, saving articles, and creating a reference list as you write your assignment or independent study.
The university also subscribes to the full version of EndNote (currently at version 20) which is available to download for both PC and Mac OS. This is only available to students and staff while they are at the university, so once your programme of study ends you will no longer have access to the software and will need to export your data so that you can import it into one of the free reference management programmes out there (or purchase your own subscription to a commercial version.) But exporting that data is relatively easy to do.
For more information and links, have a look at our reference managers library guide.
We also run regular workshops introducing reference managers in general and also looking more specifically at how to use EndNote at both an introductory and intermediate level. If you are an early career researcher / academic and have used EndNote up to intermediate level then the Research Liaison Librarians will also offer advanced sessions more suited to research roles.