MGH Guides: Literature Reviews: Systematic, Scoping, Integrative: Review Tools and Applications

What is Covidence?

Covidence is an online tool to help you manage and streamline your review protocol. Thanks to Treadwell Library at MGH, it is free for the IHP community. Watch the short video below to preview some of its features.

Learn How to Use Covidence

You have several options for learning how to use Covidence.

Take the Workshop

Our self-paced and asynchronous D2L workshop makes it easy and convenient to learn how to use Covidence. Click here to enroll. The entire workshop takes about 1-2 hours to complete.

Request a Consultation

If you need further assistance after taking the workshop or would prefer a live group training, please Ask a Librarian to set up a consultation/training.

Use Covidence Support

Covidence has an extensive Knowledge Base with instructions and videos to help you learn how to use all of Covidence's features.

Register for Covidence

To access Covidence, request an invitation here using your mgh.harvard.edu or mghihp.edu e-mail address. Do not use your partners.org address.

Critical Appraisal Tools

If you are making critical appraisal/quality assessment part of your review, there are several tools and checklists out there to help make it easier.

Cochrane Risk of Bias (RoB 2) Tool
Considered the gold standard for systematic reviews of randomized trials.
JBI Critical Appraisal Tools
This is a great resource if your systematic/scoping reviews includes a wider array of study designs. There's a checklist for each type.
CASP (Critical Appraisal Skills Program) Checklist
Another set of checklists for different study types.

More Review Tools

The tools linked to below are just some of the software packages and applications that are available to help you manage and/or complete your review. This is a list of the tools that we felt were the most useful and usable. Most of these are free. If any of them have a cost to use, this will be indicated in the description. To search for more tools not listed here, check out the Systematic Review Toolbox, linked below. If you need advice choosing a tool or help using one, please Ask a Librarian.

Systematic Review Toolbox
The Systematic Review Toolbox is a web-based catalogue of tools that support various tasks within the systematic review and wider evidence synthesis process. It was orignally developed by Dr Christopher Marshall and Anthea Sutton, launching in 2014.

Review Management Tools

Colandr
Colandr is a web-based, open access platform for conducting evidence reviews. At each stage, machine learning and natural language processing algorithms work in the background to learn what is relevant to each review and suggest more relevant citations and likely classifications, respectively.
Rayyan
A free and flexible review management tool. Designed for systematic reviews but some of our faculty/students have successfully used it for scoping reviews as well.
JBI Sumari
If you want to publish your review in JBI, you need to use their review management tool, Sumari.
RevMan
A review management tool for Cochrane review teams.

Search Assistance Tools

Article-based PubMed Search Engine (APSE)
If any of your work was indexed by PubMed, then we can help you to discover recent publications relevant to your article. All you need to do is provide the PubMed ID (PMID) or the title and you will receive six (or more if you wish) recommendations of relevant studies. By confirming the degree of relevance using just a few clicks, you will be contributing to the construction of a community-wide benchmark for relevant literature search along the way.
CitationChaser
Automates forward and backward ancestry searches. Paste a list of DOIs, and this app uses the Lens.org search tool to look for cited papers.
MEDLINE Transpose
MEDLINE Transpose was developed to mitigate a common problem among information specialists: converting search syntax between PubMed and Ovid MEDLINE interfaces. We recommend using this in consultation with a librarian because the tool is still in beta testing.
MeSH On Demand
Paste text like an article abstract into MeSH On Demand and it will suggest relevant MeSH terms to use in your search query.
SnowGlobe
SnowGlobe is a program that assists with literature searching, using a technique called snowballing. The process of snowballing takes all known relevant papers and searches through their references (which papers they cite) and citations (which papers cite them). Doing this by hand is an extremely time-consuming process, and until now, there was no way to do this process in bulk. SnowGlobe has several time-saving features such as automatic duplicate removal, as well as the ability to track which titles you have already screened so you don't have to screen them multiple times.
Yale MeSH Analyzer
Compare MeSH terms assigned to PubMed articles to find more MeSH terms your may be missing.

Data Extraction Tools

MGH RedCap
Software application for electronic collection and management of research and clinical study data. More often used for surveys, but some of our faculty and students have used it to build data extraction forms.
SRDR+
The Systematic Review Data Repository (SRDR+) is a collaborative, Web-based repository of systematic review data. This resource serves as both an archive and data extraction tool and is shared among organizations and individuals producing systematic reviews worldwide, enabling the creation of a central database of systematic review data which may be critiqued, updated, and augmented on an ongoing basis. This database is freely accessible to facilitate evidence reviews and thus improve and speed up policy-making with regards to healthcare.

Reporting Tools

PRISMA 2020
Input your data and this app builds a PRISMA flow diagram to include in the final document of your review.