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Table 2 Steps for performing the manual abstraction

From: Considerations for conducting systematic reviews: evaluating the performance of different methods for de-duplicating references

1

The citation and abstract fields from the combined database search results on Ovid were exported in Excel Sheet format.

2

The Excel Sheet was sorted by publication title.

3

Any brackets preceding a publication title (used in Ovid to denote non-English content) were removed and the Excel Sheet was re-sorted by publication title.

4

Duplicates were identified manually and highlighted.

5

The Excel Sheet was then sorted by author.

6

Duplicates were identified manually and highlighted.

7

Abstracts were used in steps 4 and 6 above to verify duplicate references, as needed. In some cases, if abstracts were not available, the full-text articles were retrieved.

8

Unique references were moved into a separate Excel Sheet to serve as the benchmark set.