Covidence: Support for systematic reviews

What is Covidence?

Covidence is a web-based software platform designed to facilitate the work with systematic reviews. The platform supports the entire workflow, including importing references, checking for duplicates, screening titles and abstracts, reviewing full texts, assessing risk of bias, extracting study characteristics and results, and exporting data and references.

How can Covidence help?

Covidence enables research groups to work efficiently and in a structured manner when selecting and reviewing articles. The software:

• facilitates collaboration between multiple researchers

• provides traceable documentation of selection, inclusion/exclusion criteria and decisions

• enables data to be exported for further analysis.

Who can access the programme?

Karlstad University Library has purchased a Covidence package for 40 reviews. The licence is valid until 30 June 2026. Projects started during this period will then remain active for a further 12 months (until 30 June 2027) to allow ongoing work to be completed.

Access to the programme is granted to researchers and PhD students at Kau who are conducting full-scale literature reviews in teams.

Each review must have a designated contact person who is employed at Kau. This person can invite other users to participate in the review, including external individuals who are not affiliated with Kau.

Accounts are personal and may not be shared.

How to request an account

To request a project in Covidence, please contact forskarstod@kau.se and provide the following information:

• The name of your review.

• The type of review: Systematic, Scoping, Rapid, Umbrella, Literature or Other.

• The research area

• Type of question: Therapy, prevention, etiology, diagnosis, prognosis, qualitative or other.

Once your request has been approved, you will receive an email invitation (check your spam folder) → click on ‘Accept invitation’.

Log in if you already have a Covidence account linked to your university address, or register a new account (always use your university address to link to the licence).

What type of material is the service intended for?

Covidence is only intended for published material. The following may not be handled in the software:

• Privacy-sensitive personal data

• Sensitive personal data

• Confidential information

Uploading full texts to Covidence

Covidence has a feature that automatically uploads PDFs for open access articles when the system can find them.

When uploading full texts manually, copyright and licence agreements must be taken into account. Only material to which you have legal access can be uploaded, i.e. content that is freely available online or through agreements and licences. Read more about what applies on the Copyright and plagiarism webpage.

Documentation of the work process

To ensure transparency and enable manual recreation of the selection process in the event of system failure, it is recommended that you document and save the work process, including the inclusion and exclusion criteria, be documented and saved on your Kau computer or in Sunet Drive.

Personal data and data storage

Please note that Covidence is an external service with servers in Australia, a country that does not have the same level of data protection as the EU/EEA. Personal data (such as name and email address) is therefore transferred to Australia when you use the service.