Screen studies

To access studies not yet screened, click Continue from the review's summary page: 

For each study, Covidence presents the title, article details and abstract. Use the No, Maybe or Yes buttons to keep or discard the study.

The default number of people required to screen each study is two, however, this can be changed within the review's settings. For reviews with the default settings (dual screening), studies will be sorted as follows:

• Studies marked with No by two reviews it will not be moved to the next step of full text screening.
• Studies marked with Maybe or Yes by only one reviewer, and No by the other, will be sorted into the Resolve conflicts group.
• Studies marked with Maybe or Yes by both reviews will be moved to the next step - full text screening. 

Adding highlights

You can choose to highlight certain words in the records as screen. 

To set up highlights, select Settings > Eligibility Criteria > Highlights.

Add keywords into the left (inclusion) and right (exclusion) columns:

On your screening page, select "Show highlights" to see the inclusion keywords (highlighted in green) and the exclusion keywords (highlighted in red):

Access studies ready for full text screening from the Review's dashboard: 

To attach PDFs to the studies, see the Import PDFs page within this guide.

Customise exclusion criteria

Reviews have full control over the list of exclusion criteria. 

To exclude a study:

• Click the Exclude button
• Select a reason from the dropdown menu, or select Edit this List > Add, then add the reason and select Done.

To create a new list of reasons for exclusions:

• From the review dashboard, click Settings > Criteria & exclusion reasons
• Add exclusion criteria and select Save

Covidence has recently added a feature to automatically remove studies not reporting on randomized controlled trials (RCT). Currently this feature will only appear if you have indicated that you are in the medical and health sciences area of research field in the review settings. 

To use this feature go the the ‘Edit Review Settings’ page and click the box in the ‘Automation Options’ section underneath ‘Area of research’.