You will need to keep a record of your searches.

Most databases allow you to create an account which will let you save and re-run your searches at a later date.

Most also allow you to set up an alert so that the search will run automatically once in while (you choose how often) and will email you any new items which have been added to the database. This is a good idea as it means you can carry on with your work and be confident that you are aware of new research in your area. Learn more about current awareness on our guide.

The key to this is in the name - you need to be systematic. The idea is to apply the same search as closely as possible to each of your databases or sources. As some databases use a controlled vocabulary, some don't, and others have different functionality, you won't be able to just run the same search through each database - you will have to adapt it, but the aim is try and be as consistent as possible.

Draw up a table for each database so you can see which terms worked well in each.

Plan ahead

Searching properly takes time. Getting to understand the databases and controlled vocabularies also takes a while. Allow yourself plenty of time to search. Your first search won't be your final one - you will probably run lots of searches before you find the ones which work best and give the highest quality results.

When you have your results from the database searches you will need to handsearch them. See the box below for information on hand searching...

Handsearching is the term for looking at the titles and abstracts of your results to decide which to keep and which to discard.

This is often the most subtle part of your search.

How many results should I have before I start to handsearch?

This very much depends on your subject. Some areas are very large and you may find yourself handsearching a couple of thousand references, other research areas have a very small literature base and will have less than 100 papers.

Two thousand sounds like a lot of results to look through, but you can actually get through them very quickly, as you can often decide just by the title if you want to keep result or not. Be prepared to take a break though - looking at lots of search results can be confusing and headache- inducing after a while!

The sign of a good search is that the same relevant results come up in all your searches. The databases often have overlapping content and this is useful to reassure you that you are replicating your search as consistently as possible across all your sources.

However, you don't want to be reading  the same abstract over and over again, so you can use Endnote to deduplicate your results.

To deduplicate your results, import each set of results from your databases into a new Endnote library. When you are ready to combine them all, open a fresh Endnote library.

Click on File from the top toolbar, and Import and file from the drop down menu.

For the 'Import Option', select the database results you wish to import by clicking on Choose file and browse to find the EndNote file required. Click on this, and click Open. Click Import and two libraries will merge. Keep doing this until you have imported all the results from your various Endnote folders. There is a default option for the results to deduplicate.