Your search is likely to generate hundreds if not thousands of references. You need to decide what to do with these results - basically, put them into software of some kind. This would be either into a reference management package, such as EndNote, or directly into screening software such as Covidence. The Library can provide help and training via our Library HITS training sessions or your Subject Librarian.
If you decide to use reference management software as part of the process, we strongly recommend sing the full "Desktop" version of EndNote. Trinity College Dublin has a site licence for EndNote and current staff and students are permitted to install a copy of the software on both their personal and College-owned machines, with the proviso that copies must be removed when the user leaves College.
Other reference apps such as Zotero and Mendeley can be used if you prefer, but we cannot help with support of these apps. You should never have more than one of these apps installed, as they conflict with each other and will cause problems.
The advantage of this is that you now have a snapshot of all your searches saved; if anything goes wrong with the study in the future, you can go back to this point and start again. However, for some reviews, it might make sense to skip this step (see below).
For smaller reviews, or ones which are not likely to require the searches to be run again later, it is most likely fine to NOT use EndNote, Zotero etc. as the intermediate stage to hold your results. Instead, you could export the results from the databases to your desktop, and then import them directly into Covidence. Covidence now allows you to document where results come from as part of the import process, which adds with record keeping.
