Welcome
Imperial College London can offer its staff, researchers and students access to its unlimited institutional-wide licence to Covidence.
Covidence is a web-based software platform that streamlines the production of systematic/scoping/rapid/literature reviews. It can support the stages of reference/citation screening, full-text review, risk of bias assessment, extraction of study characteristics and outcomes, and the export of data and references.
More about Covidence
The Covidence interface is intuitive and suitable for students and experienced reviewers. Covidence can save time on repetitive review tasks, enabling faster review production and more time for analysis and interpretation.
Discover more about Covidence on each link:
Import references - Covidence works seamlessly with reference management software such as EndNote, or any tool that supports RIS or other file formats. Covidence can automatically remove duplicates for you.
Screen title & abstract - Breeze through screening with keyword highlighting & a lightning-quick interface. Covidence keeps full records of who voted and supports single or dual screeners.
Bulk PDF import - Transfer PDFs stored in your reference manager to Covidence in a few clicks.
Screen full text - Decide quickly on studies in full text. Capture reasons for exclusion and any notes so you can resolve any disagreements quickly, with a click of a button.
Create forms - Be in control and stay focused on your PICO question. Customisable extraction forms mean you only spend time extracting what you need.
Customise risk of bias - Automatically populate your risk of bias tables by highlighting and commenting on the text directly in your PDF.
Conduct data extraction - Extract data efficiently with a side-by-side view of your customised form and PDF. Then, when you are done, easily compare your form with other reviewers.
Export - Covidence exports to all the common formats so you can continue your review in your preferred software.
Collaborate - You can invite other reviewers (including external colleagues) to work with you on the project.
Imperial College’s institutional licence with Covidence gives you
Unlimited references/citations for each review.
Unlimited number of reviewers for each review (you can add reviewers from outside the college e.g. collaborate with NHS colleagues).
Unlimited number of reviews.
How to access the Imperial College’s licence account with Single Sign-On (SSO)
New Users -If you have not yet signed up to Covidence with your Imperial email address, you will need to create a new account. You can do this simply by signing in via Single-Sign-On (SSO):
Go to the Covidence SSO Sign-in page
Enter your Imperial email address
You will be redirected to your university's SSO login page, and can enter your university credentials
If you have entered the correct credentials, you will be redirected back to Covidence; a merge window prompt will appear to check if you have an existing account with a different email address. Sign in if you have the other account's credentials to merge your work into one place, OR continue with 'Create a New Account'
If you continue with ‘Create a New Account’ - To ensure your Covidence account functions correctly, you’ll be asked for a few additional details to get started. Fill these in, and then click 'Create account'
Existing Users (Option 1) - If your existing account in Covidence is with your non-Imperial email address:
Sign in to your account using the current email and password via the sign-in page
Go to Profile settings and add your Imperial email address
Verify the email through the confirmation message sent to the email address you added
Sign out of Covidence
Go to the Covidence SSO Sign-in page
Enter your Imperial email address
You will be redirected to your university's SSO login page, and enter your university credentials
If you have entered the correct credentials, and the university email matches the one added, your existing account will link automatically; if not, you may see the merge window prompt from 'New Users' above
Existing Users (Option 2) - If you have previously used Covidence and already have a user account associated with your Imperial email address, simply log in via SSO to see your existing reviews and to create new reviews.
Go to the Covidence SSO Sign-in page
Enter your Imperial email address
You will be redirected to your university's SSO login page, and can enter your university credentials
If you have entered the correct credentials, you will be redirected back to Covidence and connected to your existing user account.
Whenever you sign in via SSO, whether to a new account or an existing account, your account will be linked to the university licence.
Please note: If you have gone to the Start a New Review page and the University licence is missing, where you think it should be available, check first to ensure you have signed in to Covidence via your Imperial College London SSO.
Starting a review under the institutional licence
Sign in to Covidence
Select “Start a new review”
Under 'Which account do you want to use?", ensure to select "Imperial College London"
Please note: If you have started a review in the wrong licence, please contact support@covidence.org
Reviews created using the Imperial licence account will be visible to Covidence subscription administrators at the organisation. Reviews created using your user account are only visible to you.
Once you have created a review or accepted an invitation to another university account review, the title will appear in a separate section on your account homepage:
Support from the University Library for Covidence and Systematic, and Research Reviews
Our Medical Librarians support students and staff and conducting literature reviews, systematic reviews, meta-analyses and other types of research reviews.
For more guidance in planning, conducting, reporting and publishing research reviews at Imperial College, see our Systematic Review Flowchart, or contact your Librarian to get 1:1 advice.
More information and useful links for literature searching and evidence synthesis can be found on our Medicine Subject Support page.
Support from Covidence
Covidence offers a range of available resources and support to help you along the way with your systematic review process.
To get familiar with how a Covidence workflow works, you can try our pre-set Demo review. This will allow you to gain hands-on experience and better understand the process. You will find it at the bottom of your dashboard once you have signed in. Give it a go and feel free to explore!
Getting started with Covidence - video tutorials that guide you through the initial area to get you started.
Covidence Knowledge Base - home to all of our comprehensive articles, instructions and advice to FAQs.
Covidence Academy - Learn and understand the essentials of systematic reviews and gain insight with expert-led training and content to guide you through every step of the review process.
Covidence eBook Collection - Download our step-by-step practical guides for Systematic Review Success!
Monthly Open Training Webinars - Join our Community Team for free webinars (registration required) or watch our recent recordings without delay.
Online Support Team- contact our team directly for support on your review by emailing support@covidence.org
When logged into your account, you can also easily contact the Support Team and the comprehensive articles from our Knowledge Base within Covidence by clicking the 'Need help?' button in the lower right-hand corner of the screen.
Maintaining Access to Your Work When Leaving the University
We recommend adding a secondary email address before you leave to make it easier to continue using your Covidence account without interruption.
If you need to log back into your Covidence account but cannot because you don’t have access to your university email address anymore, please get in touch by emailing support@covidence.org.