Systematic Reviews

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. 

Most databases will require you to create an account first. For Medline, Embase and PsycINFO, you can create a single account within Ovid. You can add a note to remind you which database the search was created for. Check the Library’s quick reference guides for more details on how to do this. 

 

Saving your search results 

Look out for the options to save your search results. These will include exporting, printing or emailing them. For a systematic review, you should always export your results to EndNote or another citation management package such as Mendeley or Zotero. 

 

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. Think clearly about which studies you want to include or exclude and note down your criteria. 

 

Citation management tools 

You should use software such as EndNote to store the records you find. You can use it to help you manage your records as you make decisions about which to use in the review and how. It will also be very helpful de-duplicating your records.  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. 

Covidence is another tool which has a free trial that allows a basic level of access. 

 

Next step: Analysing your results