PhD student Andrea Parisi from the Research School of Population Health and a team of developers from ANU won first prize in Canberra's first HealthHack event.

HealthHack is national event that helps medical researchers, health professionals and students find solutions to their important problems. 

Dr Parisi worked with developers Aqeel Akber, Sam Backwell, Michael Barson and Zac Hatfield Dodds to find a way to eliminate the hundreds of hours spent manually sorting duplicates of scientific papers from different online scientific libraries to find the most relevant research.

Their program CITeX is able to export data from different citation managers and identify 99.7 per cent of duplicates, pick the best of the duplicates and import it back into the citation manager.

"As a researcher working on systematic reviews, manual sorting of duplicates can take two to three weeks and there is no automatic way of comparing the number of references quickly and efficiently," she said.

"With CITeX, the program we created, this can be finished in less than one minute."

The program is also able to compare several citation libraries in terms of the number of duplicates and unique articles. This allows an independent systematic review by several researchers and quickly compares the references and numbers of each.

Dr Parisi said there is still some work to be done before the program could be of benefit to the research community.

 "The program needs to be more user-friendly as now it only runs from a command line," she said.

The program is now online and free to download.