Review settings defined at the creation of the Review can be changed at any time.
When Creating a New Review, you will utilize the Settings function of Covidence to outline your project, beginning with the Review Settings option at the top of the Settings page:
When initially setting up your review, you will be asked if the review is a Cochrane Review. This is a Y/N option. Should you select 'Yes,' there is a mandatory requirement for multiple screeners.
Per the image above, the first step is to provide a name for your review. This, generally, will be the title that you have identified as you created your Systematic Review Protocol.
You will select the Review Type. This overview of Covidence is using a Systematic Review as the model for its review type; however, there are many different types for which you might wish to use Covidence, and some of those options are provided, including a Scoping Review, Rapid Review, Umbrella Review, Literature Review, and any Other type that might suit your purpose.)
Question Type for a Systematic Review is most often going to be Therapy, that is, a review that seeks to answer whether or not an intervention or treatment is effective for a certain disease or condition. However, there are other question types for which researchers seek answers, including Prevention; Etiology -- harm/causation; diagnosis; prognosis -- forecast; Qualitative -- meaning; and Others. Covidence seeks to provide options that cover these other scenarios.
Area of Research. Again, Covidence is best intended for those research areas covering Medical and Health Sciences, but many other discipline choices are possible. It is important to note that the following selection regarding Automation, only applies to reviews whose area of research is Medical/Health Sciences.
Automation (Med/Health only). This features takes advantage of the default data extraction template in Covidence to automatically identify key sections of a study, including those related to the population studied, the population characteristics, the intervention(s) and their characteristics (dose, frequency, etc.) in the study, and much more. Additionally, you can Tag references in Covidence and use those tags to identify articles important to your systematic review. The Automation feature also includes the Cochrane Randomized Controlled Trial classifier, if you choose it, which by default marks and includes RCTs in your systematic review and can also exclude studies which are not randomized controlled trials.
Search Information can be captured with the creation of your review as well, including the date on which the search was run, what the search strategy was, and other information, including the number of reviewers required for screening, for full text reviewing, and for data extraction.
Finally, at the bottom of the initial Settings page, you can select which Data Extraction method you will employ when you reach this point later in the Covidenc review process. Extraction 1 is the Data Extraction method you will select if performing a Cochrane Review or a standard Systematic Review that employs a PICO framework. You will select this method if you ultimately will be exporting your Covidence file to Review Manager (RevMan).