You don't have to use EndNote to help you manage your references but we strongly recommend that you use something. Referencing software allows you to collect, organise citations and references and insert them into your documents and will then format them into your preferred style and create a bibliography for you.
The other software to consider are Mendeley, Zotero, BibTeX as well as the EndNote Online which is the much simpler version of EndNote Desktop. These are not supported by the University as they are free to download so all technical help must be addressed to them. More information here on each to help you make up your mind.
Conducting systematic reviews means finding and sorting large numbers of references, you could be dealing with thousands of citations from many different databases. Endnote can help you manage this process.
To save you time we have written guides on how to download large amounts of references into Endnote from different databases. Please let us know if you would like any others included.
De-Duplication is a quick easy way to ensure you will not have to screen the same article twice.
Custom Fields can be used to create a place where different researchers can record their screening decisions, making it much easier to share decision making. See the following article for methods for using EndNote for systematic reviews: King, R., Hooper, B. and Wood, W. (2011) 'Using bibliographic software to appraise and code data in educational systematic review research', Medical Teacher, 33(9), 719-23, https://doi.org/10.3109/0142159X.2011.558138
You can use EndNote to merge libraries to quickly view screening decisions, Please watch these 2 screencasts from the ESMI team at the Medical School at the University of Exeter for more information. You can also follow the logic using the poster they produced.