When researchers conduct a study, they might produce different reports from one study. For example, they might register their proposal or protocol in a register, publish their proposal/protocol in a journal, present their results in three conferences as an abstract, the slides, or a poster, and publish the three papers in different journals.
Although they have done one study, they have produced 8 reports of the same study. Although these references may have been treated as separate studies in the early stages of the systematic review, as soon as you realise that they all belong to the same study, you should merge them into one study (Watch our video to see how you can merge the studies in Review Manager (RevMan)).
While conducting the systematic review, we group all reports of the same study under a single study name and cite the Study rather than a single report to present the whole body of the work. This process is sometimes called ‘Studification’.
This means we do not delete the other reports just because they are a protocol or a conference abstract, but we keep them all under one study name, for example, Jackson 20171-8.
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