Covidence updates www.covidence.org

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New

The bulk PDF upload tool has been redesigned based on your feedback. It's now more streamlined and easier to use.

What’s new:

• It’s faster. Covidence now exports a list of only the studies that are missing full texts. This saves time because review teams no longer need to compile this list themselves.
• The design is clearer and more intuitive.
• The workflow is split into stages and user guides are available with step-by-step instructions for the different reference managers.

Try the bulk PDF upload tool by navigating to the full text stage of your review and selecting "Bulk upload missing full texts".

To find out more about the new bulk PDF upload tool, read this knowledge based article.

For reviews being completed in the “Medical and health sciences” area, you can now enable the RCT classifier tagging functionality via the settings page.

You can also update the type of review and area of research via the settings page.

Improvement

You can now mark any study as a duplicate using the “Duplicate” action, including those that the system has identified as a primary reference:

Improvement

We’ve made improvements to how you can upload and manage full texts during full text screening with a new upload screen. On the new screen you can easily:

• Drag and drop or select to upload PDFs
• Add a link to the full text
• Remove full texts
• View who uploaded the full text and when
• Update which PDF is the primary full text

New

To save you time when screening, once you have uploaded a full text, all members of the reviewing team will be able to see the file name or link on the screening list. From here, you can open them in one click.

New

To support your full text retrieval process you can now export which studies are missing full text. You can find this option via the Review Summary Page and clicking the 'Export' button.

For more information, check out this article.

New

Save time uploading PDFs during full text screening, by using the new drag and drop feature. You can now drag and drop directly onto the full text screening list.

Improvement

We've made changes to improve the experience when changing the number of reviewers required to complete data extraction.

Previously, if you updated your review settings so that only one reviewer is required to complete data extraction. Those studies that had two reviewers already assigned would require both reviewers to complete extraction before you could move onto consensus.

Now, if two reviewers are assigned to a study, all data will be preserved but only one reviewer will be required to complete data extraction before the study can progress to the consensus stage of data extraction.

Improvement

We’ve made changes to how contribution counts are calculated to improve their accuracy, taking into account votes being undone and studies being moved back to screening.

Previously, when reviewers chose to move a study back to screening or mark a study as a duplicate, that study's votes still contributed to the count. Now they will not.

For more information about how contribution is calculated, check out this article.