Follow the instructions below to set up and customize your review.
Sign in to your Covidence account and click the blue Start a new review button.
You will see a list of options:
After you've created your review, you will be directed to the Review Summary screen. Here you can see the different tabs representing the different stages of a review, the PRISMA flowchart, an Export button, and the Settings. You want to set up your review settings before you begin importing references.
Click Settings. You will see 5 tabs: Review Settings, Reviewers, Team Settings, Eligibility Criteria, and Study Tags.
Here is where you can make edits to any of the initial settings you selected when first creating your review (Name of Review, Review Type, Question Type, Area of Research). You can also add additional information for your search strategy or review citation if applicable.
This is where you can change the template style between Extraction 1 vs. Extraction 2. Extraction 1 is a fixed template most appropriate for systematic reviews, while Extraction 2 is a customizable template that works for most other reviews. Covidence provides a full explanation of the differences between the two templates so you can make an informed choice, but you can click here for a more thorough explanation.
For video tutorials, this one will provide information on how to set up a template in Extraction 1 and this one will provide information on setting up, saving, and publishing an Extraction 2 template.
For more information on adding additional reviewers and changing the number of reviewers required for tasks, go to our Individual vs. Team Review page.
Adding criteria into your review helps you ascribe meaning to articles that filter through during the title and abstract screening phase. Having clear criteria outlined at the beginning provides consistency amongst your review team and allows for a high quality research process.
If you have used PICO to create your research question, Covidence uses a PICO model for inputting your criteria. Putting in the work at that stage of the process pays off here, as identifying and inputting your criteria should be easy to do. For assistance with creating and managing eligibility criteria, check out Covidence's article on the subject.
For those who prefer color coding visual assistance, the highlighting feature is a key tool to utilize in Covidence. Covidence allows you to add inclusion and exclusion criteria keywords and will highlight them, green and red respectively, during the Title and Abstract Screening phase you can quickly visually identify important topics to save you time.
Once you've saved your criteria, go back into your Title and Abstract Screening and click Show highlights. Now you will be able to easily identify inclusion and exclusion criteria now that it's conveniently color coded, helping you move through this phase faster.
For tips on how to utilize highlights in Covidence, check out these articles:
In Covidence, you control the criteria for excluding articles from your review. In this setting, you can customize the list of exclusion criteria by editing what Covidence has automatically added or by creating your own unique criteria.
For more assistance with full-text exclusion criteria, check out this article from Covidence.
Adding tags are a convenient way to organize articles, especially if they don't fit into your review but you still want to use their content. For example, you could create a tag called "Background" and tag this to articles who's content is relevant for the context of your review, but cannot pass other review criteria to move further on in the process.
For tips on using study tags, check out Covidence's article here.
While in the full text review stage, you can add notes to specific articles to communicate to your teammates!
Underneath the article's information, click on the blue Note icon.
You can add a note to this article that can be read by your team.
Add your note and then click the blue Add button. Now the article will indicate that there is a note attached to it.
