All VCU faculty, students, and staff can now sign up for institutional access to Covidence, an online tool that streamlines the production of systematic reviews, scoping reviews and other literature-intensive research projects.

Covidence coordinates the screening process of titles/abstracts and full-text articles, and it facilitates the population of data extraction forms and risk of bias tables. Having an easy-to-use tool like Covidence is helpful when coordinating team projects that will likely take at least several months to complete, which is the case for most systematic review projects.

“We are excited to be able to offer the VCU Community access to this tool for a three-year pilot period,” said Emily Hurst, head of the Research and Education department and deputy director of the Health Sciences Library. “Covidence has been used by librarians working with faculty teams on systematic reviews with great success. We hope others at VCU will use this tool to support their research in meaningful ways.”

VCU Libraries’ institutional license to Covidence provides researchers with unlimited reviews, users, collaborators and support. To learn more about Covidence and how to sign up, go to https://guides.library.vcu.edu/covidence. Librarians continue to support systematic review work at VCU as well. Please contact your librarian for more information on how they can provide you with assistance on your systematic review. 

This VCU Libraries subscription is part of a three-year pilot program from Jan. 2023 - Dec. 2025. An assessment will be conducted during the third year to determine whether to maintain the subscription.