Get help from a medicine librarian
Before you book an appointment about your review, please check our support policy further down this page to understand what we can and cannot help with.
Systematic reviews - Community of Practice
Doing a systematic review? Join our Microsoft Teams site. Its aim is to provide an online community space for researchers to advise and support each other. Ask questions about your review, comment on the articles & resources we suggest and help answer the questions of others.
The site is open to experienced reviewers from across Imperial as well as those who are new to the process.
Covidence - better systematic review management
Covidence is a web-based systematic review management platform with an intuitive interface suitable for students and experienced reviewers alike. It streamlines the processes of citation screening, full text review, risk of bias and data extraction and export, all in an online collaborative environment.
Join under Imperial College's institutional license for unlimited reviews.
Systematic review guidance
Systematic review guide
This guide has been created by the Medicine Liaison Librarian team to support all staff and students at Imperial who are involved in conducting systematic reviews.
- Each section of the guide introduces the activities involved in that step of a systematic review and highlights any necessary documentation or mandatory reporting items relevant to that step.
- Every section provides links to further resources to support the review activities such as specific chapters in guidelines, more detailed guides or useful journal articles.
- Where relevant, tools to manage or support systematic reviews (such as Covidence) are discussed in relation to each review step
NHS staff conducting reviews will also find it useful. Those conducting Scoping and other types of research reviews will be able to use many of the sections to guide activities such as systematic searching and there are further resources on doing these types of reviews. While it mainly focuses on review methods for healthcare contexts, much of the guidance is applicable to reviews in other disciplines.
Systematic review support
The Cochrane Handbook recommends that ‘Review authors should work closely, from the start of the protocol, with an experienced medical / healthcare librarian or information specialist’. Due to the amount of time required to provide these services, and the need to respect course requirements, levels of service for academic staff and students are outlined below and apply for other types of knowledge syntheses such as scoping reviews, rapid reviews and umbrella reviews.
Type of user
Systematic review software
Covidence (Imperial resource)
Covidence is a web-based systematic review management platform created in collaboration with Cochrane to manage screening and data collection, for individuals or multiple authors.
Key benefits include:
- Streamlines production of systematic reviews by supporting collaboration and keeping decision making and documentation in one place, safe and easy to access for the whole team
- Students and experienced reviewers alike will find it intuitive to use and it can be used to do a full systematic review or support a literature review done in a systematic manner
- Imperial users can invite external reviewers (e.g. from an NHS Trust or other university) to be co-reviewers, even if those reviewers do not have access to Covidence via their own institution
The key steps supported by Covidence are:
Import of citations from a range of reference managers and de-duplication of study citations (with manual override), title and abstract level screening, full-text review, risk of bias assessment, extraction of study characteristics and outcomes, export of data into RevMan and Excel and of references into reference management software.
Join under Imperial College London institutional licence for unlimited reviews.