Literature Reviews

One of the interesting things that I found when I entered into the Department of Community Health Sciences (Epidemiology, Health Services Research, Biostatistics, Public Health) was the emphasis on literature reviews and the formal methods about conducting them.

The other thing that I found interesting was that even though Literature Reviews had formal methods, there was no software created specifically for helping with the workflow or optimizing the approach.  Software such as EndNote or Reference Manager (owned by the same company) was used for managing the references and helping with cite and write — however there was no software targeted at improving the process.

To address this, a new version of Knowledge Share was created to specifically aid in conducting scoping reviews and systematic reviews.  This new version was known as KSv2 and later renamed to Synthesis as it better represented want the software was really about — “to Synthesize the Literature”.