Covidence: Reference 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.

Once you have screened all studies by title-abstract, your team will need to resolve all conflicts before you move on to 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 can find instructions for uploading and appending the full-text PDF for each study below.

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.

You can track the contributions of each reviewer to the project under Team Settings on the main page for the review. 

When authors disagree about whether a reference should be moved from screening to full-text, or from full-text to included/excluded, it will appear on the Resolve Conflicts page. All current conflicts will show up in a list on this page, in very similar format to the screening page. 

Covidence has chosen to blind the votes even during conflict resolution, displaying only who provided the conflicting votes and not what the votes were. This is with the goal of minimizing bias within the entire screening process and specifically minimizing bias for the person providing the conflict-resolving vote.

Title and Abstract conflicts:

In this page, you will see who voted, and three options for the final decision: yes, no, and maybe. Note that a 'maybe' vote will move the reference into full-text screening.

Full Text conflicts:

In this page, you will see who voted and have two potential choices to make. If there was one vote for inclusion and one for exclusion, your voting option will be to act as a tiebreaker and choose to either include or exclude it. If both reviewers have voted to exclude, but disagree on the exclusion reason, you will have to make a final decision on the reason for exclusion and assign the correct exclusion criteria.

3. Locate the PDF on your computer and save.

4. A View full text button will now appear instead of the Add full text button.

If you use Full Text @UAB Libraries and the requested resource is not available through UAB Libraries, you will get directed to our catalog that says "Your search did not match any physical resource in the library."  Next, you will scroll down to the "Get It" section of the page to "Request article from Lister Hill Library or Mervyn H. Sterne Library via Interlibrary Loan. You may also try your search in Google Scholar as some resources are available there that the library does not own.

You can log in with your Blazer ID 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 1-3 business days with an email saying the article is ready to download.  Follow the link in the email, log in with your Blazer ID and password, and go to the Electronically Received Articles tab to download your article.  You must download the article within 30 days.