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Chapter 4 66 wish to tailor their supportive practices to expatriates as well as assignments in order to increase the effectiveness and the return on investment of the provided support. 4.2 Search Methodology In September 2015, we systematically searched the libraries Web of Science (Core Collection); EBSCOhost (Business Source Elite, PsycARTICLES, PsycINFO, Psychological and Behavioral Sciences Collection); ProQuest and ScienceDirect for relevant documents. Twenty-one keywords had been derived from literature and through discussion with international human resources and expatriate management scholars in the authors’ networks. Clustered into three subgroups, these keywords resulted in 100 possible keyword combinations for which titles, abstracts and subject terms of documents were searched (Table 4.1). In addition to the automated search, all issues of the Journal of Global Mobility published prior to September 2015 were manually inspected for additional relevant studies by examining their abstracts and full texts. 4.2.1 Inclusion Criteria The automated search resulted in 854 references, of which 572 were unique. Of these, 78 references were excluded because they were not written in English (2), did not refer to an academic study (22), or no full text was available (54). Next, studies had to examine expatriates in a professional environment. This led to the exclusion of 225 documents that studied regular employees, missionaries, soldiers, partners, students or repatriates, or that did not study a work context. Another 171 documents were excluded because they did not examine success criteria. Following Caligiuri (1997) and Harrison and Shaffer (2005), expatriates’ adjustment, commitment, performance, and retention (including return intentions) were considered relevant criteria of IA success for this literature review. Expatriates’ satisfaction was added as a fifth success criterion because scholars regard it as a proxy for the mediational process between social support and success (e.g., Cao et al., 2014). Finally, 36 documents were excluded because they did not examine social support. Of the remaining 64 documents, 37 were empirical studies examining how social support in expatriates’ work environments influences at least one of the criteria named above. A manual search of the Journal of Global Mobility resulted in the identification of two additional studies that met the inclusion criteria. The final selection therefore yielded 39 articles, including three doctoral dissertations (De Paul Chism, 2014; Littrel, 2007; Pattie, 2007). Please refer to Table 4.2 for an overview of the selection process.