Paper Trail Folder

From the book: Health Sciences Literature Review Made Easy

Chapter 1: pg. 31-32

Documenting your search of the literature: This is a record of the search process you used to identify relevant materials. 

Examples include: 

• Which librarians or other experts you talked to about the search
• Notes about the material examined
• Keywords used to search the electronic bibliographic databases
• A list of instructions for electronic searches and the instructions you gave

This is where you will begin to build the PRISMA Flowchart of Documents that you will eventually report in your final paper.

Chapter 4 Documents Folder

1. Remember to record the initial number of source documents
2. What to include in a source documents subfolder
• Source Documents Subfolder
• One copy of each of the papers or source documents is assembled for the literature review
• PRISMA Flowchart
3. How to select source documents for your review
• Review the Abstract
• If a paper hasn't reached publication yet, download the preliminary copy as a PDF
• Insert that abstract into your Source Documents Folder with the current year as publication date and allow it to become a placeholder until the actual paper becomes available. 
• Skim the document
• Download a Copy of the Document
4. How to organize a source documents subfolder
• Organize the research articles chronologically by year of publication
5. How to remember where you put the documents
• More than one Master Folder
• If you wind up with more than one, give them specific names
6. PRISMA Flowchart Subfolder: How to track the number of source documents from initiation to completion of review.