Covidence: Review Management Tasks

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 Manage Imports 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.

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.

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) will currently export to Excel/CSV. For this reason, they are also visible to your co-reviewers.

1. Export your Full text reference list from Covidence to EndNote, Zotero or Mendeley.
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2. Import the references to your selected reference manager.
3. Find the PDFs and attach them to the corresponding reference
   • This can be done manually or by using automated find full text feature available in many reference managers.
4. Export the list of references from EndNote, Zotero or Mendeley in EndNote XML format
5. From your list of studies for full text review, click on the "Bulk upload PDFs" button.

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6. Click select file and upload the XML file.

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7. To the right of this uploaded file, drag and drop or select the PDF files associated with your references from your computer.

This will be easiest if you have stored all of your associated PDFs in one location. 

• If you've used an automated find-PDF feature, PDFs will be automatically filed by the reference manager in a programme-specific directory.
  • EndNote automatically stores PDFs in individual folders. To avoid having to individually open each of these folders, a folder merger programme can be used.
• If you've stored your PDFs yourself, make sure that they have the same title as the one assigned by EndNote, or make sure that EndNote is set not to change the PDF name.

The PDFs will now be uploaded and automatically attached to the appropriate reference.