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Nursing Systematic Reviews: Using Covidence for Screening

Created by Health Science Librarians

The Covidence Guide

This is a brief description of how to use Covidence for 779.  For more details, consult the HSL Covidence guide or Ask a Librarian.

Before You Begin Screening

Before you begin screening, be sure that your number of reviewers is correct.  Click the Settings button and then Review Settings. If you are Title/Abstract screening with a partner, set your "Reviewers required for screen" to 2 and your "Reviewers required for full text review" to 1.  If you are screening by yourself, set both to 1.  You can change these numbers in your review settings menu.

review settings

Under the Criteria & exclusion reasons tab, you can add keywords, which will tell Covidence to highlight certain words that could indicate inclusion or exclusion. This will help you screen faster.  You can also manage your exclusion reasons, which will give you a customized drop-down list of exclusion criteria for use during the full text review level.

settings buttons

Then, when you go into the Title/Abstract screening level, click the button for Show Highlights.

show highlights button

Title and Abstract Screening

Once you have imported your references into Covidence you're ready to start screening.

To screen by title and abstract click the Screen tab. Make your decision by clicking on the Yes, Maybe or No buttons for each reference.

What you see when you submit your vote will depend on what your vote was and how many people are required to vote on each study during the screening phase. By default, a new review within Covidence is set up in dual screening mode, where another reviewer will have to vote before your study is moved to the next step, but you can change this in your review settings.

When in dual screening mode, two Yes or two Maybe votes will move a reference into full-text screening. Two No votes wil move a reference to irrelevant, and one No vote and one Yes or Maybe vote will move a reference to the resolve conflicts area.

Two yes or maybe votes moves paper along to full text screening.

Once you have screened all studies by title and abstract, your team will need to resolve all conflicts before you move on to full-text screening. 

Before You Review Full Text- How to Get Articles

When you review at the Full Text level, you will need to get the full articles for every reference. 

In Endnote- Select the articles you want to find.  Under References, select Find Full Text to find as many PDFs as you can.  This feature works best on campus.  Then, for articles Endnote does not automatically find, you can type the title of other articles into a database like Pubmed or CINAHL and use the Find@UNC button to get the full article.

In F1000- If you have set UNC as your institution, you can click the Institutional Access button for each article to connect to the full text.  To set UNC as your institution, paste https://login.libproxy.lib.unc.edu/login?url=$@ into your account's Proxy Settings.

In Mendeley- In the citation details, scroll down to the URL area.  If you see a link that begins with vb3lk7eb4t or libproxy.lib.unc.edu, you can connect to the article on or off campus.  If you do not see this link, or if the available URLs do not connect you to the article, you can type the title of other articles into a database like Pubmed or CINAHL and use the Find@UNC button to get the full 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.

item not available

request item

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.

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.

Full Text Screening

After you have completed your title-abstract screening, you will need to review the full text of all articles included at the title-abstract level. At this level, you will need to select an exclusion reason for any articles that you do not wish to include. You can find instructions for customizing your exclusion criteria under the Creating a Review tab. 

You must select a reason for excluding a study.  These come from your exclusion criteria you set up.

You can find instructions for uploading and appending the full text PDF for each study below.

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.
 

Select "upload full text"

3. Locate the PDF on your computer and save.

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

A link to the PDF will now appear under the Full text tab