MDCH630 - Designing Medical Education Research

Even simple literature reviews can be time consuming, involve multiple resources searched over a period of months, and require that searches be rerun. A few tips for keeping track of your work and ensuring that you track the information you need for reporting:

• Keep a running record of what you've done in a Word document. This should include notes on question development, especially if your research question evolves over time; lists of databases searched, reproductions of search strategies and notes about changes made to those strategies, and an indication of when you last searched a database.
• You may also want to track some of this information using this search tracking spreadsheet developed by the librarians at the MD Anderson Medical Library.

You will need a reference management tool to keep track of all of your literature. While there are free tools such as Mendeley and Zotero, we recommend EndNote for large-scale reviews. EndNote can be purchased at an educational discount from the bookstore for $140 (must present Unicard). 

Check out our EndNote Guide for the basics.

You can use EndNote for much more than just storing literature and formatting references; it can also remove duplicates from multiple database searches, and help you to organize literature based on inclusion and exclusion criteria. This guide from the M.D. Anderson Medical Library describes some methods for using EndNote to manage your literature. 

A number of software programs are available for managing large reviews. Here are links to the two most common. Covidence charges a fee, while Rayyan can be downloaded for free.