Covidence: a new tool for managing and simplifying Systematic Reviews

Imperial team meeting

If you are planning or doing a Systematic Review, or supporting or supervising students or researchers in their reviews, you’ll want to use Covidence. Covidence is a web-based tool that improves healthcare evidence synthesis by improving the efficiency and experience of creating and maintaining Systematic Reviews, including Cochrane intervention reviews.


It provides keyword highlighting and records the screening decision of multiple reviewers. Uploading PDFs is quick and easy and exclusion notes can be captured to resolve disagreements. Covidence includes customisable data extraction forms and automatically populates the Risk of Bias tables and Prisma Flow Chart. The interface is simple and intuitive and suitable for students and experienced reviewers alike.

Covidence can save you time on repetitive review tasks, enabling faster review production and more time for analysis and interpretation by:

  • importing citations and PDFs direct from your searches and identifying duplicate records
  • allowing for single or multiple reviewers
  • highlighting keywords and offering you a simple yes/no/maybe choice when screening titles and abstracts
  • recording your (fully customisable) exclusion criteria and notes during full-text screening
  • easily resolving screening, risk of bias and data extractions conflicts
  • automatically populating your Risk of Bias table by highlighting and commenting on text within PDFs
  • creating a customisable data extraction form
  • exporting data into RevMan or Excel for meta-analysis
  • your reference management software (such as EndNote and RefWorks)
  • keeping a record of all your actions and automatically populating your Prisma flowchart for you throughout the process
  • allowing use on the move on your phone or tablet

To request access to Imperial College’s Covidence account, you must have an active Imperial College e-mail address.

Join at https://www.covidence.org/organizations/7g067/signup by entering your college email address and clicking “Request Invitation”, then accept the email invite.

You’ll get unlimited records for each review as well as an unlimited number of reviewers (you can add reviewers from outside college e.g. collaborate with NHS colleagues).

Our Medical Librarians support students and staff and conducting literature reviews, systematic reviews, meta-analyses and other types of research reviews.

For more guidance in planning, conducting, reporting and publishing research reviews at Imperial College, see our  Systematic Review Guide https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/administration-and-support-services/library/public/systematic-review-flowchart-september-2018.pdf, or contact your Librarian https://www.imperial.ac.uk/admin-services/library/subject-support/medicine-and-biomedical-science/ to get 1:1 advice.

More information and useful links for literature searching and evidence synthesis can be found on our Medicine Subject Support page http://www.imperial.ac.uk/admin-services/library/subject-support/medicine-and-biomedical-science/.

Covidence offers short video tutorials in their Knowledge Base to help you get started with your review. See https://support.covidence.org/help/getting-started-with-covidence-new and https://support.covidence.org/help/getting-started-with-covidence.

 

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