The emission of continuous gravitational waves (CWs), with duration much
longer than the typical data taking runs, is expected from several sources,
notably spinning neutron stars, asymmetric with respect to their rotation axis
and more exotic sources, like ultra-light scalar boson clouds formed around
Kerr black holes and sub-solar mass primordial binary black holes. Unless the
signal time evolution is well predicted and its relevant parameters accurately
known, the search for CWs is typically based on semi-coherent methods, where
the full data set is divided in shorter chunks of given duration, which are
properly processed, and then incoherently combined. In this paper we present a
semi-coherent method, in which the so-called \textit{5-vector} statistics is
computed for the various data segments and then summed after the removal of the
Earth Doppler modulation and signal intrinsic spin-down. The method can work
with segment duration of several days, thanks to a double stage procedure in
which an initial rough correction of the Doppler and spin-down is followed by a
refined step in which the residual variations are removed. This method can be
efficiently applied for directed searches, where the source position is known
to a good level of accuracy, and in the candidate follow-up stage of
wide-parameter space searches.Comment: 16 pages, 12 figure