SOIL SCI 875: Systematic Reviews in Agriculture and Environmental Sciences (Spring 2024) : Document Your Search

You will want to keep notes on your literature search process. Think of these notes as similar to the lab or field notes you record as you research.  It is a record of your thought process as you develop a search strategy and perform exploratory literature searches (scoping exercise).

Word/GoogleDocs or Excel/GoogleSheets can be used for this process. (These documents will not be the space or the tools you will use to store your final search results or to select the articles for analysis based on inclusion/exclusion criteria).

You will want to record your early planning and brainstorming:

• Citations of known literature that you are using as keyword inspiration
• Keywords and filters that you think will be useful to use as search terms
• Databases and other tools you will use to discover literature.
• Your research question in PICO format and a brief narrative about the bigger picture to your question

As you construct and execute searches you will want to record:

• The exact search string used (keywords, filters & limits)
• Date the search was run
• The database the search was run through
• How many results you got
• Notes and observations about the results as you scan through titles

Example spreadsheet template

"Documenting Your Systematic Review Searches with Excel" (video), University of Alabama Libraries

In preparing for your review, you will begin with a scoping (or preliminary) search of the literature. 

Your scoping search will help you:

• Identify existing reviews (so as not to duplicate work),
• Assess the quantity and quality of relevant, primary research studies (so as to be sufficiently abundant and productive for your work), and
• Identify key (benchmark) articles/publications with which to inform your subsequent searching.