Knowledge Synthesis and Covidence

Covidence is a software that supports research teams conducting systematic review projects by streamlining the review process. Using Nova Scotia Health’s institutional subscription, you and your research team can collaborate through each stage of a project, from importing your references to disseminating your data.

How to join Nova Scotia Health’s Covidence institutional license:

You can create your personal sign-in information with Covidence before or after joining the institutional subscription.

1. Send an email request to litsearch@nshealth.ca using your @nshealth.ca email address. You will receive an invitation from Covidence via email.
2. Accept this invitation.
   • Check your spam folder if the invitation doesn’t arrive in a few minutes.
   • Please keep in mind that the link is one-time use and will expire in 30 days.
3. Log in to your existing Covidence account, or sign up for a new account, which will automatically link you to Nova Scotia Health’s institutional license.
   • If you have already joined the Nova Scotia Health Covidence account, then you can log into Covidence and log in with your email and password and proceed to using Covidence.

You can also invite team members to your review. Your team members do not need to be affiliated with Nova Scotia Health to be invited to a review. By inviting them, they will have access to your review; however, they cannot create their own review projects under our subscription.

Covidence has detailed walkthroughs and tutorial videos for each step of the review process. You can access their help guide at:

If you want one-on-one assistance with Covidence, you can also book a consultation with one of our librarians.

Working with a team is a must when it comes to knowledge synthesis projects. It is important to add your other team members to your Covidence review project. This allows them to participate in all the steps of a review.

Once you've developed your search strategy and have your search results from various databases ready to go, you can import those search results into Covidence. Covidence supports three formats for file imports: EndNote XML, PubMed text format, RIS text format.

To screen the references you have imported into Covidence by title and abstract, you can click "Continue" under the Title and abstract screening section of your Review summary page. Each title/abstract can be voted "yes", "no", or "maybe". 

• By default, you will need to have 2 separate people vote on each title/abstract before it can be reviewed as full-text. This setting can be changed, however.
• All voting is blinded. This means you cannot tell how others have voted until you have voted yourself.

To review the full-text of each reference that has been screened for inclusion, click "Continue" under the Full Text Review section of your Review summary page.

• All open-access articles will automatically have a full-text PDF uploaded through Covidence. For other articles, each PDF must be uploaded manually.
• Your exclusion reasons can be customized by going into Settings.

While not every review type requires the research team to check for risk of bias on every article they intend to use for their review, it is recommended. On Covidence, they refer to Risk of Bias as 'Quality Assessment'. The Quality Assessment form looks slightly different depending on if you are using Extraction 1 or Extraction 2. Check the Data Extraction box below for more information on the difference between the two.

Both options come with a default template based on Cochrane's Risk of Bias, but you may choose to create your own template. Check out the page on Risk of Bias Tools, you can see various Risk of Bias forms used for various types of studies which you can copy onto a custom template on Cochrane.

While reading through each article, data will need to be collected so that it can be synthesized. Covidence can help by allowing your team to create a customized data extraction form allowing your team members to collect exactly what is needed. The Covidence data extraction interface has the article PDF and the data extraction form displayed side-by-side for convenience. You can also decide to have 2 blinded extractors per article.

When creating your data extraction form, there are two types of templates to start with: Extraction 1 and Extraction 2. Extraction 1 adheres to the Cochrane Systematic Review protocol. Extraction 2 is designed for non-systematic review types and provides more customizability when creating the data extraction form.

At various stages of your review, you can export different forms of your review's data and references, including:

• Extracted data
• Inter-reliability (IRR) data
• Study lists
• PRISMA flow diagram
• And more

Read through the Covidence Support page on exporting data to see what can be exported from your review and in what formats.