Systematic literature review – Managing duplicates
22/05/2026
One of the questions which often comes up when discussing the SLR process is how do I manage my references in the most efficient way during the process of going from my search results to my final list of articles?
Each step of the SLR process has its own challenges. You need to identify your keywords, then construct your search strings, then work out the combinations of the search strings and which databases to use e.g., EBSCO Business Source Ultimate, ProQuest One Business, Scopus, Web of Science, in order to retrieve the articles which are key to your research topic.
Not all the articles retrieved will be relevant and you will need to filter your initial results sets according to the inclusion and exclusion criteria you defined in your protocol. You will begin by screening the title and abstract against your inclusion and exclusion criteria, and then against the full text. At each stage you will need to document:
- how many articles there were
- for each of your search string combinations
- from each of your chosen databases.
Sounds simple enough, until you realise that there will inevitably be duplication between the sources…
The good news is that you can export all of your references, with abstracts, directly from each of these resources. The download option to use for EBSCO Business Source Ultimate and Scopus is the CSV option. For ProQuest One Business it is XLS and for Web of Science it is Excel.
EBSCO Business Source Ultimate
From the checkbox at the top of the results use the dropdown option to select ‘Export results up to 25,000’. You may be prompted to log in to your Cranfield account (but this may happen automatically). From the ‘Export results’ window add your Cranfield email address and select CSV as the export format. You will receive an email from EBSCO (this may take some time, depending on the size of your download). Click the link in the email to download the data. Find more details about this process from EBSCO.
ProQuest One Business
You can add your search results to a folder in ‘My research’ or export your results to Excel direct from the search results page. To do this, change the ‘Items per page to 100’, check the box to select all results on the page, click on the three dots (ellipsis) to open the ‘All save & export options’ and select the XLS Microsoft Excel Format. Repeat the process for additional pages if you have more than 100 results.
Scopus and Web of Science
You can export your results direct from the results page of both of these indexes by selecting the Export option and following the instructions given.
Once you have downloaded the information into Excel, you can then use the power of Excel to help you tag, filter and sort your references so that you can easily identify duplicates and also keep track of which references were found in each database.
ExcelDemy provides further guidance on how to use Excel to remove duplicates, which you may find useful.
Want to learn more?
You may be interested in reading other posts on conducting systematic literature reviews.
Due to the complexity of this process, you are welcome to speak with a librarian who can provide more guidance.
Image by kirill_makes_pics from Pixabay
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