Covidence is a systematic review screening tool used to streamline the process of screening, reviewing, analyzing, synthesizing and disseminating data you collect from reviewed articles. The main point of conducting systematic reviews is to analyze the findings across studies to answer a clinical question. This process is a time-consuming team process, so having access to and the use of a tool that can simplify some of the steps of the process is extremely helpful.

Covidence has a few features that people really find helpful: deduplication of imported citations, automatic population of the PRISMA flowsheet and the ability to export lists of articles and data into different formats for analysis.

De-duplication citations

When conducting a systematic review, team members will be searching for articles across multiple databases, as the goal of a systematic review is to find all possible studies that potentially answer the clinical question of the review. When importing citation information from each database (i.e., PubMed, CINAHL and EMBASE), Covidence will combine all the individual databases’ citation information to make a full list of all citations imported. Some citations imported will be duplicates, as they are included in possibly more than one database and Covidence, when it recognizes a duplicate citation, will automatically remove it, that is, de-duplicate the list of citations. This is an important step because of the need to show in a PRISMA flowsheet how the literature search was conducted in a systematic review.

Automatic population of the PRISMA flowsheet

One tool used for the documentation of the literature search steps is the PRISMA flowsheet. Luckily for Covidence users, the PRISMA flowsheet is a widget in Covidence that automatically gets populated with information when the team conducts the citation importing, screening and full-text review steps. This saves teams time and effort to create the flowsheet manually.

Exporting article and data information

The PRISMA flowsheet, lists of articles included in screening and full-text review steps and data extracted through Covidence templates can all be exported into other document types for analysis and publication. One example of this is the ability to export data extracted in either Covidence-created or -customized extraction templates into CSV or Excel files. This makes all data available in one spreadsheet to review and find themes and patterns in the data versus having to acquire and document this information manually.

Diving deeper with Covidence

Would you like to learn more about using Covidence? Covidence has its own YouTube channel with videos about using this tool: Covidence - YouTube.  Covidence answers some of the most frequently asked questions (FAQs) in its help section found here: Covidence Knowledge Base. 

You can also reach out to your liaison librarian at the Health Sciences Library with questions about using Covidence for systematic review assignments and projects: Research & Education | Health Sciences Library (osu.edu).