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Systematic Review Service

Partnering with MSK community members interested in systematic and related reviews

Screen Your Results

Title and abstract screening required independent review from two reviewers, followed by conflict resolution.After your results are imported into Covidence, it is time to begin the screening process.

The first phase is title and abstract screening:

  • Two team members must review each record.
  • In Covidence, you can select Yes, Maybe, or No.
    • Two votes of either Yes or Maybe move the record to the full text screening phase.
    • Two votes of No exclude the record from inclusion in your review.
  • Your team can decide to have a third reviewer resolve any screening conflicts or to have conflicts resolved by consensus.

It is recommended that your team practice screening on a test set of articles before beginning the process in earnest. This pilot will make sure the inclusion and exclusion criteria set out in your protocol are sufficient and clear, and that everyone screening is on the same page, reducing the number of potential conflicts.

Full text screening requires two independent reviewers, followed by conflict resolutionOnce you have finished title/abstract screening, it is time to screen the full text of each record that has been selected for further screening.

This process is almost identical to the title/abstract screening with one large difference: you need to include the reason for exclusion.

  • Two team members must review each record.
  • In Covidence, you can select Yes or No.
    • Two votes of Yes move the record to the quality assessment/data extraction phase.
    • Two votes of No exclude the record from inclusion in your review.
      • However: Two No votes that give different reasons for exclusion are considered a conflict.
  • Your team can decide to have a third reviewer resolve any screening conflicts or to have conflicts resolved by consensus.

To avoid a large number of conflicts due to different reasons for exclusion, the best practice is to list your exclusion reasons in order of importance, and select them based on the order listed.

How the MSK Library Can Help

Once you have reached full-text review, you will notice that Covidence is able to auto-populate some full texts that are open access, but for many of these records you will need to find full text. Your MSK librarian can assist with this process if the team experiences issues.

We recommend downloading the LibKey Nomad browser extension, then linking it to MSK Library holdings, as it will give you fast, one-click access to the full text of many scholarly articles. Click on the resulting "Download PDF" button to view and download the full text or the "Access Options" button to request PDFs of articles that are not available. Note that conference abstracts may not have an associated LibKey Nomad option.

You can also download the records in Covidence that are missing full text and use a citation or reference manager like EndNote to locate and upload these PDFs. Covidence has instructions on how to do this. 

For anything that is not immediately available via the library’s electronic subscriptions, submit a request to Document Delivery Services and the item will be delivered to you within a few days.

How Covidence Can Help

Covidence makes screening organized and easily trackable.

Use Covidence's Settings options to: 

Title and Abstract Screening demo:

Full Text Screening demo: