Systematic Reviews for the Social Sciences

Managing your search results 

Saving your search strategy 

When you have set up a search strategy that works, you should save it firstly so you can re-run it when you need to but also so that you have a record of your strategy that you can include when you when you write up your review. 

Documenting your search 

Make sure you keep a note of which databases or other search tools that you use to compile your set of references. Include the date ranges covered and note when you ran the search most recently.

Screening your results

You will need to think about how you want to manage the process of screening your results. You will have to look at the results from all of your searches, remove duplicates and think clearly about which studies meet the criteria for inclusion in your study and make a note of why. You could do this in a few ways:

Spreadsheet

Most databases will allow you to export your search results as a spreadsheet. You could combine all of these into one sheet, use conditional formatting to identify duplicates, colour code studies that are included or excluded and create a column for notes on each title. Depending on the number of results you find, this may quickly become unwieldy, especially as you will be including the article abstracts. 

Citation management tools 

You could export your search results directly to a citation management tool, like EndNote, use the "find duplicates" tool to perform the first stage of your screening, before using folders to arrange your included/excluded studies.  You can link to your own stored PDFs of your papers. Citation management software also allows you to insert correctly formatted references into your final document and create a reference list or bibliography. 

Please see our further information on using Endnote Desktop and Endnote Online. 

There is also information on using Mendeley (freely available reference management software). 

Systematic Review tools 

These are designed to help you manage the screening process. Currently, the University of Bristol does not subscribe to any of these tools, but Rayyan has a several levels of access, including a free one.

• To use Rayyan, you will need to create an account and start a review.
• Give your review a name, so that you can save your data.
• Download your search results from each database as an RIS file. Rename the file with the name of the database and then upload all of these to Rayyan.
• You can run a duplication detection tool and then you will need to "resolve" each duplication. 
• You can set inclusion/ exclusion keywords - there are some already populated, but you can customise these for your review. Rayyan will highlight these terms in each of your results, helping you spot how they have been used and support your screening process. 
• You can then mark each result as include/ exclude or maybe. These will be moved into different lists, making it easy to manage the screening process and create the data you need for your Prisma flowchart. 
• You can label your results, so you know which criteria it met/failed on.
• You can upload PDFs of the papers you want to include, storing the whole review process in one place. 

Next step: Analysing your results