Get help
Book a consultation with a Medicine Librarian for support with your systematic or scoping review
NHS library members please contact your NHS support librarian
Community of Practice
Doing a systematic review? Join our Microsoft Teams site.
We provide an online community space for researchers to advise and support each other.
The site is open to experienced reviewers from across Imperial as well as those who are new to the process.
Systematic review guide
Our Medicine Subject Librarians have developed this guide to support all staff and students at Imperial who are involved in conducting systematic reviews.
Each section introduces the activities involved in that step and highlights any necessary documentation or mandatory reporting items.
The sections provide links to further resources to support the review activities and any relevant tools used to manage or support that step.
NHS staff will also find it useful for scoping and other types of research reviews.
Covidence
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 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
- Export of references to reference management software
Join under Imperial's institutional licence for unlimited reviews.