Covidence (systematic review)
Covidence is an online tool that helps you manage systematic reviews of research. Reviewers can collaboratively screen articles and finalise which papers to analyse in the review.
Key features
- Collate references: bring together bibliographic references from a range of sources.
- Screen papers: manage and streamline a selection of papers to include within a detailed literature review.
- Document your process: keep track of the numbers of papers you’re including and excluding at each stage, in order to ensure critical appraisal principles.
- Extract your data: format your data in a range of ways and export to other tools for further analysis.
- Unlimited reviews when you join and review from the University’s institutional Covidence account.
Access instructions
Joining the University's institutional account
- Request access to the institutional account. You must use your @york.ac.uk or @hyms.ac.uk email address.
- Accept the invitation sent to your email.
- Sign in with your personal account, or create a new account. You must not use your University password.
When creating reviews, you can choose to use your personal or University account. Learn how this affects your review privacy.
Available to staff and students
You can use this service on University-managed and personal devices.
Web-based
This service works in your web browser.
Funded by the University
There isn’t a cost to you for standard use.
Additional information
When creating new reviews, you have the option to use your personal account or select the University of York account.
- Reviews created under the University’s institutional license will be visible to the administrators of the University of York Covidence account.
- Reviews made using your personal account will only be seen by you.
Access instructions
Joining the University's institutional account
- Request access to the institutional account. You must use your @york.ac.uk or @hyms.ac.uk email address.
- Accept the invitation sent to your email.
- Sign in with your personal account, or create a new account. You must not use your University password.
When creating reviews, you can choose to use your personal or University account. Learn how this affects your review privacy.
Guides and help
How-to guides and set up
- How to accept an invitation to join an institutional account (covidence.org)
- Covidence help and support (covidence.org)
- More research systems support
Accessibility
Contact for support
- For general and technical help, see Covidence’s help pages (covidence.org).
- If you’re experiencing issues accessing the University account, please contact our Covidence Support team.
Service commitments
- As per your agreement with the University of York, you must not use your University password to set up your Covidence account.
- If you sign up to use Covidence you're required to set up a personal user account. As a user of Covidence you need to read and agree to their privacy policy. Please ensure you are happy with their terms of service as an individual service user before you agree to using their service.
- You can export your reviews at any time and Covidence recommend in their Terms of Service and Privacy Policy that you do this on a regular basis to back-up your work.
- Sharing and revoking access to your reviews cannot be managed centrally. It's therefore the Covidence user's responsibility to manage these access processes.
- If you have any questions, please contact the Research Systems Support Hub.
The following policies apply to all IT services provided by the University.
Availability
- This is a live service, available 24/7.
Support
- This service is managed by a third party.
- They are responsible for monitoring, identifying and fixing faults. We provide advice and support for local issues during our opening hours.
Standards
- Our service performance and standards have been produced in consultation with our customers. We regularly monitor the delivery, performance and availability of facilities and services.
We appreciate feedback as it helps us review and continually improve our service.
Page last reviewed: 29 January 2025