There are several software tools and products that can help to manage the screening process but we recommend Covidence – an online, collaborative systematic review management platform. Covidence helps to manage and support the review steps of title and abstract screening, full-text screening, data extraction and quality assessment.
Imperial has an institutional subscription to Covidence. Imperial staff, students and NHS library members can join under Imperial's institutional licence.
Overall benefits of Covidence include:
- Institutional subscription - Imperial staff, students and NHS library members have unlimited reviews and reviewers
- Removes the logistical burden of selected parts of reviewing – the workflow is already set up for you and based on the methods required for a Cochrane review
- Safety and access – all documentation is safe in Covidence and easily accessible online
- Enables collaborations – supports multiple reviewers and allows you to invite co-reviewers from other institutions to work with you in Covidence
- Reduces Bias - A pre-set workflow means less chance of deviation from accepted review methodology
- Reporting – every relevant action and decision made in Covidence on reporting items are recorded and displayed in a PRISMA Flow diagram that updates in real time
- Manages and supports data extraction and risk of bias quality assessment activities
- Works well with other reference managers. Easily import RIS files into Covidence and export out again files to reference management software to find full text or for later referencing at any stage of the review.
Benefits of screening in Covidence are:
- Choose the number of reviewers – two reviewers is set as default but you could also have only one person screening or several.
- Once a reference has received two votes, it will not come up for consideration for other reviewers who have not yet seen it, saving time and effort.
- Conflict resolution - there is the ability to assign a tie-breaker role, and then the voting history is blinded for this person.
- There is full blinding for both screening and conflict resolution.
- Citation tracking - citations are randomly ordered, and all touches to a citation and reviewer interactions with a reference are automatically tracked.
