With the aim of making data FAIR, this methodological protocol describes the step-by-step process of identifying the relevant international literature to be reviewed within the EU Horizon MSCA project ‘The affective economies of emerging private renting markets: understanding tenants and landlords in postcommunist Romania” (AFFECTIVE-PRS). It presents: (1) the decisions taken related to the breadth of the review (choice of databases, type of research, type of reference, searching fields); (2) the construction and piloting of the searching strings and their keywords; (3) the systematic retrieving of references and their manual check for criteria fit; (4) additional hand-made searching to boost the sample of the literature to be reviewed; and (5) a mapping of the global coverage of this literature. While the paper demonstrates the rigor of the methodological approach taken, it also opens up the space for other scholars to scrutinise, replicate or adjust this approach to their own work.