Covidence Full-Text PDF Enhancements

Covidence, the systematic review (SR) project management tool that is available for use by everyone in the MSK community via a site license, has recently introduced some noteworthy improvements related to importing the PDF attachments for the full-text screening stage.

  • You can now export only the records of citations missing the Full-Text PDFs.

Being able to easily extract a list of citations of studies missing full text PDFs does not sound like a game-changing enhancement. However, for SR team members who regularly dedicate hours of work harvesting the full-text PDFs for the Full-Text Screening stage of a project, this functionality will be a huge time-saver.

  • You can now export citations as an RIS file for import into reference manager programs beyond Endnote, including:

    1. Endnote
    2. Cochrane Registry of Studies
    3. Zotero
    4. Mendeley
    5. RefWorks

With an increasing number of citation manager program options available to users, including here at MSK – see Citation Management LibGuide for more details – it is nice to see that Covidence is becoming inter-operable with more tools to better match user preferences.

  • You can now bring in Open Access articles using Unpaywall and automatically upload them when studies move to to the Full Text screening or Data Extraction stages.

With the amount of available Open Access journal content continuously increasing, having the ability to automatically bring in the needed full-text that is openly-available on the web will become even more useful as time goes on. Furthermore, individual PDFs that users have already downloaded can now be brought into Covidence using a convenient drag and drop option, making adding these PDFs to their corresponding citation records on the screening list easier than ever.

  • You can now use the Bulk PDF Upload Tool in conjunction with either Endnote or Zotero.

The Bulk PDF Upload Tool involves a two step process that includes saving a list of citation records as an Endnote XML file after all of the needed PDFs have been harvested into a citation manager. Zotero now also accommodates the “Endnote XML” filetype, helping Covidence once again become more versatile for users who choose to use the Zotero citation manager instead of Endnote.

To learn more about Covidence, be sure to check out these training options or Ask Us at the MSK Library.