The PRISMA Statement is the key guideline for reporting on the results of your literature search. PRISMA provides a checklist and a template flow diagram:
If you're intending to publish in a journal, check its Instructions for Authors for any guidelines specific to systematic or scoping reviews.
For more general guidance, please see the guidelines in the Review Types section of this guide that correspond with the type of review you're doing and the subject (social sciences, environment, health, etc).
There is emerging guidance on reporting searches in more depth to support reproducibility. Please see the PRISMA-S link below for a draft checklist and supporting material.
Most databases allow you to export large batches of results in RIS format, which can be easily imported to Covidence for screening. This guide from the University of Alberta Library offers detailed instructions for export from Ovid, PubMed, EBSCO, Proquest, and the Cochrane Library.
A suggested workflow for managing references is:
Notes:
1. Some databases place limitations on how many results you can export at once. For instance, in Ovid the limit is 2000, but it's better to limit to batches of 1000 at a time.
2. For Web of Science, click "access the preview" to be able to export results in RIS format.
3. Some databases/websites don't support export in RIS format - see here for a workaround.
UBC Library now subscribes to Covidence, software which helps with the screening, quality appraisal and data extraction stages of systematic and scoping reviews.
To sign up for Covidence, visit the link below. You'll need to use an email address ending in ubc.ca.
UBC Library offers support for Zotero, RefWorks, and Mendeley. EndNote is another option, but UBC Library does not offer formal support for it.
Zotero and Mendeley have been found to have some limitations for systematic reviews. Notably: