Covidence: Review Management Tasks

Created by Health Science Librarians

Click on the link below to jump to the section of this page discussing that aspect of managing your review in Covidence:

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.

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

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

All Covidence projects come 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.

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

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.

Tags (as well as any notes entered) are included in exports to Excel/CSV files. 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. You can type the article title into Google Scholar on the HSL website to get the Find@UNC link or a free PDF elsewhere online.

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

3. Locate the PDF on your computer and save.

4. A link to the PDF will now appear under the Full Text tab.

Requesting an Article

If you use Find@UNC and get directed to a page that says the item is not available, scroll down on the page to Step 2- Request it from another library via Interlibrary Loan.

You can log in with your Onyen and password to request the article. The first time, you'll need to register, but click the link again after registering and it will take you to the request form. Requests are free for UNC Chapel Hill affiliates.

Once you submit a request, in about 2-3 business days with an email saying the article is ready to download. Follow the link in the email, log in with your Onyen and password, and go to the Electronically Received Articles tab to download your article. You must download the article within 30 days.