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Contact the Medical School Librarians:
ugmelib@dal.ca
In order to produce a fully replicable systematic review, your team should document as much of your search process as possible. While searching, it's a good idea to develop the following habits:
Every major health sciences database offers you the option to create a personal account. Please do so! Your account will allow you to save searches and search histories. This means you will easily be able to re-run a search. Additionally, most databases let you set up alerts that will notify you of new results as they are added to the database.
In addition to saving searches in your personal database accounts, back them up by copy and pasting them into a Word document. Include the date of each search. This will allow you to easily share searches with team members, and provide a back-up in case something goes wrong.
Notes for formatting search histories from select Dalhousie Library databases:
Embase: select all history and email to yourself. The resulting history will be in a format that can be easily copied into a table in a Word document.
PubMed: from Advanced search page, download history from search builder. This creates a spreadsheet that can be saved or copied into a Word doc.
MEDLINE through Ovid: Click the "Copy Search History Details link below the search history or type ..ps into the search bar to generate a file of the search history which can be printed, saved, or copied into a Word doc.
CINAHL: choose print history and copy the resulting table.
Scopus: Copy the complete search from the Advanced Search page
When exporting citations to your reference manager, it can be tempting to take advantage of direct export tools. Instead, we recommend saving your citation files in .RIS or .TXT format. These files can be imported directly into your reference manager. Having these files on hand is an additional method of documenting your final searches.
Each citation file name should include the following:
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To avoid bias, studies must be appraised separately by multiple members of your research team. Researchers commonly use Excel to keep track of these separate appraisals, which can then be easily compared. This video tutorial demonstrates how to export reference information from RefWorks to Excel.
