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Through growing use of the Internet and extensive access to publications and information, reviewing literature that addresses a certain topic or domain becomes increasingly complex. Systematically searching in particular is an essential task during a literature review because it requires fundamental decisions (e.g., choose search items) that affect the quality of the entire results. Although software tools hold promise to support this, there is only limited research and available tools mostly focus on functions dealing with the analysis of already identified literature. Thus, we currently lack software tools that facilitate the search phase of reviews including steps such as deriving keywords, specifying phrases and building Boolean expressions to ensure the identification of an appropriate and manageable sample of literature. This study aims to counter the 'information overload' by deriving design principles that contribute to effective, efficient and rigorous searching. To explore the state-of-the-art of search strategies in IS articles as well as typical challenges and steps during a search, we carried out a literature review and several think-aloud sessions. Based on the synthesis of the findings, we propose a set of design principles and translate them into key features that can be implemented in the form of concrete IT-artifacts.