Covidence: Systematic Review Tool guide

Review Management Tasks- Table of Contents

Topics on this page discuss aspects of managing your review in Covidence:

  • Deduplication of references
  • Tagging references
  • Linking full text/PDF to references
  • Requesting an article

Deduplication of References

We recommend using a citation manager to remove duplicate articles before importing your references into Covidence.  Covidence automatically removes some duplicates, but it is not perfect.

Check duplicates button

To check the number of duplicate articles Covidence removed, click on the Import Studies button at the top of your review.  On the Manage Imports tab, you will be able to see how many duplicates were removed and verify their accuracy.

Select "Not a Duplicate" to remove articles from duplicate list

If you click the Check duplicates button, Covidence will show you the duplicate articles and allow you to select Not a duplicate if you want to keep an article for screening.

 

Tagging References

Covidence comes pre-populated with two tags: Ongoing Study, and Awaiting Classification. To use tags, simply check the box to the left-hand side of those citations you wish to tag.

Covidence tag menu

You can add a new tag to this list by typing your term in the "Tag with:" field and clicking "create new".  

Create a new tag in Covidence tag menu

Once created and applied to references, you can also filter by these tags. This can be especially useful to get a quick count of how many references received each tag. 

Using the filter menu to search for tags

Tags (as well as any notes entered) will currently export to Excel/CSV. For this reason, they are also visible to your co-reviewers.

Linking Full Text to References

Citations must be in the Full Text level in Covidence for you to add PDFs to them. You can bulk upload PDFs using Endnote or Mendeley.  To manually attach full-text PDFs for your full-text screening stage, follow the steps below:

1. Locate and save the PDFs for your articles.  (Shortcut: You can type the article title into Google Scholar on the HSLIC Databases page website to get the Find@UNM link or a free PDF elsewhere online)

2. Go into the Full Text Screening stage of your Covidence Review.  Select Add full text for the article.

 

Covidence Add Full Text button

3. Locate the PDF on your computer and save.

4. A View full text button will now appear instead of the Add full text button.

View Full Text in Covidence

Requesting an Article

If you use Find@UNM and get directed to a page that says the item is not available, scroll down on the page and click on  Request it from another library via Interlibrary Loan.