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Search Skills: Managing Results

Managing Results

When researching, it's easy to lose track of relevant sources. Managing your results effectively ensures you have all your results in one place and can easily access, evaluate and reference them. We recommend considering how you are going to capture and manage all your results before you start searching, especially if you are undertaking a dissertation. In this section, we'll provide an overview of how to keep track of your research.

Staying Organised

When researching a topic, you will find relevant sources in multiple places, like your reading list, bibliographies and citations, and through different searches. It can be difficult to keep track of everything relevant you found, so it's important to have a strategy for a record of the sources used in your research.

It's important to manage your results for a number of reasons:

Relevance Not everything you find will be relevant or some sources may be useful for a particular aspect of your research. Keeping track of what you've found and how it is relevant helps streamline your research process. Relevant sources used appropriately will provide a solid foundation for your arguments.
Time-saving Properly organising your search results saves time by making it easier to find them later. You can quickly locate the information you need and avoid losing track of any key sources.
Avoiding plagiarism Keeping track of the sources used in your research is essential for academic integrity. A key part of your responsibility as a researcher is to give credit to original authors.

Remember:

Managing search results is vital for conducting thorough, efficient, and credible academic research.

Saving Results

We recommend signing in to library search using your University of Sussex login, because this will allow you to pin results to your favourites and save your searches.

Note:

You can also create an account, sign in and save results and searches in most other research databases.

 

To sign in to library search, click on Sign in option in the top left.

Saving a result:

To save a result, use the pin icon in the top corner of the result’s record.

Remember:

It's easy to loose track of relevant results when you're beginning your research. Saving individual results as you go makes it easy to evaluate at a later stage

Saving multiple results:

You can also save multiple results. Tick the number in the top right corner of each record to select the results you’d like to save, then click the pin icon which appears at the top of your results list.

When saving multiple results, you will get the option to add them directly to an existing folder or create a new folder for them. Note: Folders in Library Search are called 'Labels'.

Organising your Results

To view your favourites, click on the pin icon in the top right corner, next to your name.

Then scroll down past the search menu to the ‘My favourites section’. Select the ‘Saved records’ tab to see any results you’ve saved.

You can also add a label to any results you’ve saved, using the 'Add Labels' button. Labels act like folders. You can use the labels filter on the right to view only results with those labels. This is great for organising your results, either by assignment, topic or theme.

Remember:

When you're researching you might save results and discover they aren't relevant later as your research develops. You can remove irrelevant results using the crossed-out pin icon. You can also remove the label you've given to a result and add a different one by clicking on it's existing label.

Reference Management Software

For longer and more in-depth research projects, like a dissertation, managing results becomes even more important. 

Reference management software not only helps with creating accurate bibliographies and citations easily but allows you to save articles and sources to your own personal library which you can then organise into folders.  

There are a few different types of reference management software, and what’s best for you will depend on how you like to work and what kind of computer, browser and word processing software you use. 

The University of Sussex Library supports Zotero and Endnote. Visit the Library's Zotero guide for more information and guidance.

Saving Results in Library Search

Watch the video below to see for a more in-depth overview of how to use Library Search to save and organise your searches and results.

 

Video Transcript

Welcome to our tutorial on how to save and manage your search results using the University of Sussex's library search.
When conducting research, you'll come across lots of valuable resources so it's easy to lose track of what you found. Saving your search results allows you to easily access them later, saving you time and effort. It also gives you the option to organise your findings, making your research process smoother and more efficient.

So how do we do this? You'll need to sign into library search using your University of Sussex login. This will allow you to pin results to your favourites and save your searches.

You can also create an account, sign in, and save results in searches in most other research databases.
 

Signing in
We need to run a search before we can sign in to library search. Let's do a simple search for sources on art therapy. Now we can click the sign in button in the top right corner and enter our university details. Library search when your name appears in the top right corner rather than the sign in option.

Saving single results
Now we can start saving. To save result click the pin icon in the top right corner of the record. This is useful when you're researching a topic and testing out different searches, as it ensures you don't lose anything relevant. The saved item will be added to your general favourites, not to a specific folder, but we can organise further from the favourites section. To view your favourites, click on the pin icon in the top right corner next to your name. This will take you to your favourites page. Select the Saved Records tab to see all of the items you have saved. From here you can add a label to any of the results you've saved using the Add Labels button. Select an existing label or create a new one. Labels act a bit like folders. More on this later.

Saving multiple results
You can also save multiple results at once. This gives you the option to give them all an existing label or create a new one. Saving multiple results is useful once you have a more well-defined search strategy and are finding multiple relevant results.

Using labels (folders)
Labels work a lot like folders for your saved results. Once you've added some labels to your saved items, you can use the labels filter on the right to view only results with those labels. Labels are a great way to organise your results, either by assignment, topic or theme. Once you've evaluated your results, you may decide that a result isn't relevant or fits better with a different theme. To remove a result from your saved records, click on the crossed-out pin icon. You can also remove labels from your saved results using the pencil icon. If there are multiple saved items you want to edit or remove you can select them by hitting the number in the top left of their record. Then use the crossed-out pin icon at the top of the page, or the pencil icon to edit them all at once.

Saving searches
You can also save your searches to rerun them later. This is useful when you've spent time creating an effective search, but you haven't fully evaluated the results yet, or if you need to include the details of your search in your methodology. When researching, you want to avoid having to retrace your steps unnecessarily. Use the save search button at the centre at the top of your results list to add that search to your favourites. Click on the Saved searches tabs on your favourites page to view and rerun any of your saved searches.

That's all for this tutorial. Happy searching!