Bibliometrix vs Synthesis

Bibliometrix is an open-source R tool for quantitative scientometric and bibliometric research. Its analyses include descriptive statistics, co-citation, co-authorship, keyword co-occurrence, thematic mapping, and historiographic networks. It works with bibliographic files from Web of Science, Scopus, Dimensions, The Lens, PubMed, and the Cochrane Library; companion R packages add API support for Dimensions, NCBI PubMed, and Scopus. Biblioshiny provides a web interface for people without coding or R knowledge, while the package can also work with other statistical R packages. Biblioverse packages extend the system from data collection to text and content analysis. The openalexR package can bring publication, author, institution, and concept metadata from OpenAlex into bibliometrix structures. Using bibliometrix or biblioshiny requires R. Stable releases are distributed through CRAN, while a daily-updated GitHub beta may contain minor bugs. PubMed exports lack citation and reference-list metadata, preventing citation, bibliographic coupling, and co-citation links. Web of Science and Scopus service access requires a subscription.

Synthesis is software for conducting scoping, systematic and regular literature reviews. It organizes references and PDFs, searches abstracts and full-text PDFs by keyword or phrase, and automatically de-duplicates imported references. The support page reports externally validated deduplication sensitivity of 98% and specificity of 99%. Its screening workflow supports primary and secondary reviewers working through abstracts and full text, with kappa scores calculated for both. Analysis tools include AI-assisted topic clustering, word clouds, metadata extraction and charts. Embedded searches cover PubMed, PubMed Central, IEEE, arXiv.org and US Patents; references can also be imported from Ovid, Web of Knowledge, ProQuest and ACM. Synthesis can download many full-text PDFs when open or institutional access is available, and exports references and data as RIS and CSV. The trial allows unlimited projects, but each project can import only 50 references and uses a slower PDF viewer. The maker says orders and downloads are temporarily suspended during development of a new release. Licenses are tied to individual computers; pricing is available on request.