Organizing Your Search Process
Keeping a Search Log
Keeping a record of your search history can be incredibly useful during your research process. This is especially important when conducting a Literature Review or Systematic or Scoping Review.
The search log template provided here can help you keep track of information such as:
- The database or tool name (e.g. Google Scholar, e.g. PubMed)
- The search strategy or strategies you used
- The limits and/or filters you used (e.g. dates, languages, etc.)
- Notetaking (e.g. Issues you identified during your search, number of results, number of articles you selected, whether the article was peer-reviewed, etc.)
- Where you saved your results
- Date and research topic of your search log
Example Search Log
Here is an example of a search log to guide you through your record-keeping as you search!
Remember to slow down during your search to ensure your search log, notes, and research materials are all accurate and organized. Have your work securely stored, easily identifiable, and sorted to fit the needs of your project outlines.
Citation Management Tools
Having a list of references and citations that you are using for your research can become frustrating to manage, especially if you have a lot of sources to use!
Citation management tools can be a great solution to help you save time and stay organized with your references. These tools could import source citations directly from bibliographic databases (e.g. PubMed, Scopus, Web of Science, PsycInfo, OMNI, etc.) with an ability to generate automatic bibliographies, end/footnotes, or in-text citations, but they could also be manually entered and edited by you.
Citation management tools, besides their organizational capacity, may sometimes be shared with and edited by others, which makes them a useful device to do collaborative or group work.
Two free and simple citation managers to use are Zotero and Mendeley Reference Manager, which both have up-to-date guides and tutorials to browse on their webpages (Zotero under “Documentation” and Mendeley under “Help Guides”).
Western Libraries does not offer direct technical support with citation managers but will occasionally offer orientations on introducing these platforms through workshops.
Resources
Citation Management Guides
- University of British Columbia Library Research Guide: Mendeley
- University of Waterloo Libraries Research Guide: Zotero 7
Media Attributions
- Sample Search Log
