Documenting Your Systematic Review Searches with Excel
Channel: University of Alabama Libraries
Date: 2022-03-30

In this video, Alex Boucher from The University of Alabama Libraries discusses the importance of documenting your systematic literature review searches. We also provide instructions and templates for documenting your searches in Microsoft Excel.

• Get the Excel Workbook to track your searches: https://guides.lib.ua.edu/c.php?g=1135040&p=8507443 The "Excel Workbook to Track Systematic Review Search Results" by Helena VonVille is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
• Visit our Research Guide for Systematic Reviews for more helpful resources: https://guides.lib.ua.edu/sysreviews
• UA Libraries website: https://libraries.ua.edu

Transcript:
Hi, my name is Alex, I'm a librarian at The University of Alabama, and in this video I'm going to talk about documenting your systematic review searches with Microsoft Excel.

One of the key distinguishing features of a systematic review is the need for transparency and reproducibility. All aspects of the process need to be documented as precisely as possible. The search is no exception to that - in fact, it's one area where documentation is especially important. As the Cochrane Library explains, "searches should be reported in enough detail so that they could be reproduced by someone else if necessary." 

At minimum, you'll need to document: the dates when searches took place, the databases searched, the search strings, the search filters or limiters that you used, the total number of records that you found - preferably from each individual database - and then the total overall, the total number of duplicates removed, and the total number of records once duplicates are removed.

All of that is pretty much non-negotiable - it's something that must be done. How you do it is more open to personal preference. Documenting your searches in Excel is just one way, but it's an intuitive and effective way of keeping track of your information. 

This is one example of an Excel file created specifically to document a systematic review search. As you can see, we're keeping track of dates searched, databases searched, search string, search filters, search results, duplicates, etc. 

However, you don't even have to create your own Excel file. There are several different freely available templates out there that have been created specifically for documenting your systematic review searches. This one even has different tabs for different databases, with customized fields. We'll provide a link to this template below.

And that's all for this video. Hopefully you now know more about documenting your systematic review search results
and if you have any questions, just Ask a Librarian.