Systematic Reviews & Other Syntheses

Queen’s University Library subscribes to an institutional subscription to Covidence. This software will make the research review process more time and cost-efficient. 

Please note that Covidence training is available in a variety of formats including:

• Training videos
• Live webinars
• Webinar recordings

Video and webinar topics range from Covidence 101 (for getting started), to step-by-step videos and webinars for screening, full text retrieval, data extraction, etc., and more! 

For additional information, or if you prefer reading to videos and webinars, check out the help/support articles available in Covidence's knowledge base.

Covidence is a web-based software platform that streamlines the production of systematic reviews and other research reviews that require screening citations and full text, assessing risk of bias, or extracting study characteristics and outcomes.

Key features of Covidence are: 

• Support for duplicated, independent processes, including at citation screening, full text review, Risk of Bias (RoB) and Data Extraction stages
• Resolution of screening, RoB, and data extraction conflicts, and agreement on final consensus data 
• Import of citations from a range of bibliographic databases or reference managers and automatic de-duplication of citations
• Storage of full text study reports 
• Automatic population of Risk of Bias tables with text selected in full text reports
• Simple export of data into RevMan or Excel

• Unlimited number of reviews (projects)
• Unlimited number of collaborators for each review
• Unlimited number of records/citations for each review
• Unlimited Priority Support service for all users
• Invitation and migration of existing organizational users (i.e. those already using Covidence with a Queen's email address)

To join the Queen’s University institutional license: 

1. Request an invitation to the institutional license: https://www.covidence.org/organizations/5nqJ3/signup
2. Enter your information using a Queen’s email address (e.g. @queensu.ca, @qmed.ca, @dfm.queensu.ca) and select “Request Invitation”
3. Open the email invitation and select “Accept this invitation”
4. To accept the invitation, you will need to have, or otherwise create, a personal Covidence account using a Queen’s email address:
   • If you already have a personal Covidence account using a Queen’s email address, “Sign-in” using your personal Covidence account credentials
   • If you don’t already have a personal Covidence account using a Queen’s email address, select “Sign up.” Enter your information and select “Create Account.”

Note: screenshots for the instructions provided below can be found on the Queen's institutional information page of the Covidence Knowledge Base. 

To start a new review using the Queen’s University institutional license:

1. Sign-in to Covidence: https://www.covidence.org/sign_in
2. Select “Start a new review”
3. Under Which account do you want to use?, select “Queen’s University”

Reviews created using the Queen’s University institutional account will be visible to Covidence subscription administrators at Queen’s University Library. Reviews created using your personal account are only visible to you. 

• Covidence provides pages of useful information including answers to FAQs and short video tutorials in their Knowledge Base.
• Can’t find the answer that you’re looking for? Need additional help? Log into your Covidence account and select the question mark in the upper right hand corner.

McKeown S, Mir ZM. Considerations for conducting systematic reviews: evaluating the performance of different methods for de-duplicating references. Systematic Reviews. 2021 Dec;10(1):1-8.