The Covidence platform continues to evolve, with recent product updates advancing the tool towards the vision of a world where answers to questions about health and other fields of human wellbeing are accurate, up to date and accessible. The Covidence team is committed to engaging with the Cochrane community and continuing to make improvements that are user-focused. Significant improvements have been made recently to data extraction and to importing.
Covidence is an online systematic review production platform and the recommended tool for Cochrane systematic reviews. The application streamlines the most labour-intensive parts of a review, including title/abstract screening, full text review, Risk of Bias assessments, data extraction. Registered Cochrane reviews are free in Covidence, and recently this was extended to Cochrane Centre-associated reviews as well.
Covidence at Global Evidence Summit
The Covidence team will have be at stand 13A at the Global Evidence Summit in Cape Town. Please say hello and let us know how your research is going! In addition, two workshops will be held: Introduction to Covidence, and Covidence Forum. Introduction to Covidence is a complete walk-through of the tool designed for novice users. Covidence Forum is intended for individuals already familiar with Covidence, and will share more in-depth tips and have additional time for discussion and feedback.
Recent updates
Additional customisation during data extraction
Covidence has a streamlined data extraction form with many of the standard elements pre-programmed, minimising time research teams have to spend on constructing their forms. You can see a walkthrough of creating a data extraction form in Covidence here.
You’ll see that there have been several recent additions to make the form even more flexible. You can now create custom effect measures, in which the data type collected in the table can be an integer, a decimal, a percentage, or even free text for qualitative outcomes. Furthermore, these data types are now validated, so the system will flag for users when a data point differs from the indicated type. Custom text fields can also be added to several sections of the form, so if there’s information you’d like to capture that isn’t covered in the standard form, you can create a place for it.
Improved Imports
You can now view your import history directly from your review dashboard. In addition, in response to feedback that the de-duplication process was unclear, it is now displayed more explicitly in this improved review history on the dashboard. Finally, the structure of the importer has been significantly improved leading to faster and more stable imports!
What’s coming next
Upcoming work will focus on building relationships directly with each Cochrane Review Group to lay foundations for further integration between Archie / Cochrane and Covidence. Our intention is that in the future, reviews will be automatically created under the Cochrane Review Group in Covidence as soon as they are registered, making it seamless for teams to begin work as soon as they’d like. Each review will be associated with a specific group account in Covidence, which will also enable editorial team members to easily see an overview of how everyone is going. Your Covidence homepage will look similar to the accompanying image, with reviews collated by review group for easy organisation.
Have some ideas on how to continue improving Covidence?
Thank you for voicing your feedback and user needs, these are an invaluable input into our product roadmap and prioritisation process. The Covidence team would love to hear more from you! Please contact Covidence Support at support@covidence.org if you’d like to share some ideas, have a chat, or just say hello!
We also welcome feedback via this form.
Some resources you might find helpful:
- YouTube
- Covidence Knowledge Base: English and Spanish
- Webinars for Cochrane authors: more details at Cochrane Training