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Research Administration Toolkit

General Workflow

Manage Name Searching with Excel or Sheets

Keeping a centralized spreadsheet of investigator names will enable you to quickly update and search names without much manual entry. Check out this template which includes formulas to generate searchable columns of names. 

In this example (which is taken from the template linked above), you would need to manually enter the last and first name of each person. You can then drag and drop to copy the formulas from the previous row in columns C, D, and E, so that you are left with a column that you can copy and paste directly into a search interface.

Choose a Database

The appropriate databases to search will largely depend on the research area of your investigators/grant. PubMed is tied into the NIH ecosystem, as manuscripts resulting from NIH funded projects are uploaded to PubMed Central (PMC), which is indexed as part of PubMed. However, it is worth considering searching other databases in cases where there may be subject coverage outside of the health/biomedical sciences, and because grant information can be indexed in different ways which may be retrieved differently between different database searches.

Most databases will allow you to create a user account. Doing so will allow you to save and re-run searches, as well as set alerts.

Select a Reference Management Tool

A reference management tool is essential to organizing and formatting citations. While there are many open-source and subscription-based tools out there, the Library supports Zotero and EndNote. 

Zotero is a great choice for easily importing references, sharing collections with others, and generating basic reference lists. Cons: Duplicate removal must be done pair by pair. Reference style customizations are possible, but require manipulating code.

EndNote offers additional functionality beyond Zotero, such as creating criteria-based Smart Groups, customizing output styles, bulk-field updates, and customizable duplicate detection features. Cons: Sharing reference groups is possible but cumbersome.

Tutorials for Zotero and EndNote are linked in the Related Guides section.