Covidence is recognised by Cochrane as the primary screening and data extraction tool for Cochrane authors conducting standard intervention reviews. Covidence is designed to make review production more efficient and is structured to complete relevant processes in compliance with Cochrane methods.

Covidence allows Cochrane author teams to complete the following processes relevant to the production of Cochrane reviews:

  • upload search results 
  • screen abstracts and full text study reports 
  • complete data collection 
  • conduct risk of bias assessment 
  • resolve disagreements
  • export data into RevMan, CSV or Excel

In order to avail of Covidence without charge for registered Cochrane reviews, you will need to link your review to your Cochrane account. More information is available here. 

Before starting work in Covidence, please review the following information:

  • Cochrane recommends that you set up your review criteria in RevMan before screening and extracting data in Covidence.
  • Covidence has two data extraction tools, Extraction 1 and Extraction 2. Cochrane recommends Extraction 1 for standard intervention reviews as its structure aligns closely to a Cochrane review and extracted data can be imported into RevMan.
  • The transfer of data between Covidence and RevMan is only possible if you enable the feature “Study Centric Data” in RevMan.
  • Cochrane does not recommend enabling the “Study Centric Data” feature for updates of existing Cochrane reviews. So, any work you do in Covidence for review updates may need to be manually updated in RevMan.
  • If you wish to export your extracted data to RevMan, we recommend pilot-testing your template with a small number of studies to review how the data appears in RevMan. 
  • Covidence is not optimised to support complex review types (diagnostic test accuracy, prognostic and qualitative reviews). Cochrane recommends that author teams use EPPI-Reviewer for these types of reviews.
  • The standard quality assessment template for Extraction 1 is based on the Cochrane Risk of Bias version 1 tool and further information on how to export the study centric data of the RoB version 1 from Covidence to RevMan is available on this page here.
  • Covidence is not able to export Risk of Bias 2 data. Users can now enable the RoB version 2  tool in RevMan and assess the quality of the studies directly in RevMan. More guidance on this can be found here. 
 

If you are interested in using Covidence to update an existing Cochrane review in RevMan, or to carry out quality assessment or data extraction using customized templates, please review the information on the 'Exporting studies to RevMan', 'How to upload your data to RevMan', and 'Updating a Cochrane review' pages. If you need more information, please contact support@covidence.org for more information on the most effective way to manage these processes.