It isn't possible to indicate an exclusion reason at the title and abstract screening stage in the same way that you can at the full text stage in Covidence. 

To record exclusion reasons at the title and abstract screening stage, we suggest you use the customised tags function. The tags can be easily filtered to give a count of how often each was used. Please note that tags are not blinded: they are visible to everyone on the review team.

 

PRISMA 2020 and exclusion reasons

It is Covidence’s understanding that exclusion reasons at the title and abstract screening stage of a review are not part of the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA), as shown here:

 

Item #3 of the PRISMA 2020 extension for Abstracts states:

Eligibility criteria: Specify the inclusion and exclusion criteria for the review.

The inclusion and exclusion criteria for the review are the rules that determine study eligibility. These are set at the planning stage of the review and they inform the search strategy.

Exclusion reasons are selected by judging information about an individual study against the inclusion and exclusion criteria for the review.

In the standard systematic review workflow exclusion reasons are selected at the full text stage. This is because it is usually possible to remove a large proportion of studies at the Title and abstract stage without providing a reason other than that they are irrelevant.