Searching Best Practices for Evidence Synthesis Reviews

When you run your search in multiple databases, you will have many duplicate results. This is because many databases have overlaps in their indexing. For example, both PubMed and Embase search Medline (among other unique sources). Deduplicating will allow you to create a set of unique articles from all of your sources that you can then screen during your screening process. 

Some things to remember when deduplicating:

• Keep your citation files from each of your databases and keep track of how many results you have from each source before you deduplicate your results.
• When choosing which record to keep, select the article record that has the most information.
• You don't need to keep track of what database your article is from. After you deduplicate, it doesn't matter which database you got an article from.