Welcome!

The Faculty of Health Sciences of the University of Pretoria is excited to provide current researchers and staff access to their licence to Covidence.

What is Covidence?

Covidence is a web-based software platform that streamlines the production of systematic reviews. It supports citation screening, full-text review, risk of bias assessment, extraction of study characteristics and outcomes, and the export of data and references.

The 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. 

In Covidence you can:

  • Import references - Covidence works seamlessly with your favourite reference managers like EndNote, Zotero, RefWorks, Mendeley or any tool that support RIS, CSV or PubMed XML 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. Customizable extraction forms mean you only spend time extracting what you need.
  • Customize 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 customized 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.

 

Why join the Faculty of Health Sciences access to Covidence?
  • Unlimited records for each review
  • Unlimited number of reviewers for each review
  • Full access to all the functions and features

 

How to join the Faculty of Health Sciences licence account:

1. Submit your request to join by emailing Gertrude Mamabolo and Anwani Nekhumbe (make sure to use your university email address):

2. Once approved, an email invitation will be sent to you to join (you may need to check your spam folder): click 'Accept invitation'

3. Sign in to your existing Covidence account if you already have one with your university email OR sign up for a new account (make sure to use your university email address) 

After joining the Faculty of Health Sciences licence account, you will be able to sign in from anywhere by visiting: https://www.covidence.org/sign_in

 

Starting a review with the licence account:

  1. Sign in to Covidence
  2. Select 'Start a new review'       
  3. 'Which account do you want to use?', make sure to select - 'University of Pretoria Faculty of Health Sciences'

Reviews created using the Faculty of Health Sciences licence account will be visible to the administrators. Reviews created using your personal account are only visible to you. 

Once you have created a review or accepted an invitation to another Faculty of Health Sciences account review, the title will appear in a separate section on your account homepage:

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.

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.