Most reports begin with a summary of the published knowledge to date.  A government report begins with the reports that preceded it, that it builds on.  A sales report could say what has happened in the past.  A piece of research summarises the evidence that led to the hypothesis, which is tested in the experimental section.

I'm writing a literature review on head and neck cancer, and in particular on the potential for reducing the number of sexually transmitted head and neck cancers through Social Marketing, so I thought I'd find out if it can be helped using EndNote (available from AdeptScientific in UK).

As it is about Head and Neck cancers, the first port of call is the main medical and scientific source of information: PubMed.

PubMed

In Pubmed, you simply run a search across all of the journals, say "head and neck cancer", and it will find all references to this or these terms.  You can narrow the search by adding extra terms or by only searching within the title, but a good start point is a general search. (I apologise, the screenshots I've used below are for children exhibiting developmental challenges (ie behaviour) when deficient in B12. I'll update with Head & Neck screenshots soon)

Each article it finds comes up with an empty tick box on the left hand side, and you can tick a whole lot before saving them in a virtual biography.

Where PubMed really comes to its own is finding useful articles when you didn't choose the right search term in the first place.

In this example, I've opened one of the above articles by right clicking on the title and choosing [Open in New Tab].

On the right hand side of the page are articles which are relevant to the content of the article you are looking at.  It's common research practice to find an article, then look for all of the articles it refers to and see what they say; but the PubMed related articles lets you find articles that are newer, cover a wider range of subjects, summarise and so on, so it is phenomenally useful.

You can click on any of these (right click and [Open in New Tab]) to get them and read about what they say.  NOTE also that you can get the full article by clicking on the FULL TEXT ARTICLE icon in the top right had corner, or if you don't subscribe to that publisher, click [+]LinkOut at the bottom left to see more options.

From the list of articles (first screenshot) or from any of the articles themselves, you can save the articles to your Bibliography.  I know PubMed says your bibliography is for articles you've written yourself, but it is incredibly useful as a temporary storage space.  You are going to download them anyway to your computer, but I prefer to download 50 or so articles all in one go rather than downloading 5 from here, 1 from there, etc.  Of course you can use Collections instead, and this is probably what you should do

To add the article to your bibliography, or to save it to your computer, click [Send To] and choose the destination.  If you send it to a File then it will download to your computer ready to import into EndNote, and which is what you ultimately want.

I must emphasise that I usually check a lot of the articles that I ticked in the first screen, if only to find all of the Related Articles.  You know you've done a good job when you recognise most of the related articles that come up.

Another thing - as you see and read articles, you will want to change your search terms.  The beauty of the system is that you can ignore (not tick) everything that comes up in your search that doesn't look relevant, so you can use fairly broad search terms; you can also add lots of different searches together because the PubMed collection will make sure it doesn't store duplicates.

Collected the articles, now download ready to import into Endnote

My aim is to have all of these articles on my laptop, so I can read the articles, make notes, sort them out, and type up the literature review.  As I said above, it doesn't matter if they are government documents, books, films, training courses, sales figures or whatever, I need to assemble them and make sense of them for my audience.

So for Endnote I send the whole collection (all of the ticked items if I'm using collections or sending from a search) to a file.  I use the default filename, because once it is imported into EndNote I'm going to delete the file anyway, and I just remember where I downloaded it to (typically Downloads).

As you can see, I'm downloading 48 items, in MedLine format, and the sort order is completely irrelevant.

I'll come onto

• importing into EndNote,
• getting the full text of the article, reading it and making notes
• sorting everything into my final review
• writing the review

in Parts 2 (Sorting out your argument) and 3 (storyweaving)