Covidence is a softwared designed specifically to assist with systematic and scoping reviews. The large number of citations needed for these reviews (usually in the thousands) are more easily managed when using Covidence. The library is happy to offer Covidence at no charge to RUSH-affiliated researchers. To initiate your review, please email library@rush.edu.
Covidence is designed to be used after you have developed a final search strategy for each database that you plan to include. It will not help you find articles. You should start using Covidence only after you have a final search strategy developed for each database. For assistance in using the databases, check out our guides for each database which you can find on the library home page under the Help button.
What can Covidence do?
- handles bulk citation imports with ease
- allows for quick screening of title and abstract by multiple reviewers
- provides a place to attach PDFs of full text
- allows for full text screening by multiple reviewers and keeps track of reasons for exclusions
- provides information for PRISMA flowchart (it keeps track of the number of citations at the various stages of the review)
Librarian involvement usually ends with the literature search. Once citations are imported into Covidence it is expected that the researchers will handle the review. We are happy to help if you run into problems, but please be aware that these steps are not usually undertaken by the librarian.
