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Study Skills

Education Library: Literature Searching

Managing your references - introduction

It is important to record and manage your references as soon as you begin your research rather than trying to organise them all at the end.  There are various strategies you can use to do this from simple paper-based techniques to utilising the functions of the bibliographic databases or downloading a reference management tool such as Zotero, Mendeley or Endnote. Whichever method you decide to employ, choose the one that you are most comfortable with.

 

 

Zotero

Zotero is a powerful, open source database package which enables you to organise, store and search references and abstracts of research literature. It can save you a lot of time when writing assignments or papers, allowing you to input citations directly into a Word document, and to create a bibliography without having to type out all the references. You can use it to access and download selected references directly from online bibliographic databases or library catalogues.

It can also be used as a collaborative tool enabling you to share your library with your co-researchers.  Further guidance on using Zotero can be found on our Zotero Guide.

De-duplication of results

When carrying out systematic literature searches, especially on a large scale, duplication of results will be inevitable. Techniques will need to be  employed to remove duplicates from search results before carrying out screening to ascertain inclusion.  This de-duplication process is discussed below:

Note on the de-duplication process

Care needs to be taken to avoid false positives where potentially unique articles are removed in error. Any software used to aid your de-duplication process needs to be checked and used as a guide to decision-making with oversight always advisable to be with the researcher. 

The following all serve as ways to de-duplicate your list of search results:

  • Manual abstraction within a spreadsheet or such format
  • Functionality of a database such as list of journal titles indexed to check coverage (links to this information can be found in the Select a database section of the Plan tab)
  • Functionality within databases hosted by the same platform (please see further guidance below)
  • Using Reference Management software such as Zotero or Endnote etc. Zotero guidance available here.
  • Specific software – Such as the IEBH Systematic Review Accelerator
    Watch a brief introduction here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1gl-UiV0fc

 

Make use of the functionality to add articles into your folder, which will then be visible when searching other database(s) on the EBSCO platform.

Utilise the filters:

  • The publication filter within each separate database to manually exclude any publication titles you have previously looked at in a previous database search
  • The database filter for cross database searching both to see the numbers for each database as a gauge to the database with the widest coverage to your research and also at the end of the list of results, duplicates will be removed automatically.
    * Note that when searching multiple databases you need to be aware of the different terminology for each, therefore we would recommend conducting an initial search for each database separately to establish the unique keywords needed, and then perform a combined cross database search to eliminate duplicates.*

This video demonstration from the University of Hull may be useful: Using Nursing & Health journal databases: Cross-searching and removing duplicates

Kwon, Y., Lemieux, M., McTavish, J., & Wathen, N. (2015). Identifying and removing duplicate records from systematic review searches. Journal of the Medical Library Association, 103(4), 184-188.

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