Tip #6: Using Covidence to track and report snowballed references for the PRISMA 2020 flow diagram

By

Coauthored by Michelle R. Demetres, MLIS (mrd2006@med.cornell.edu)

Update (October 18, 2022): This guidance is out of date, as bulk-tagging of large import sets in Covidence is currently not possible. Instead of importing references obtained by snowballing into the original Covidence project, we recommend creating a separate Covidence project for the new references and de-duplicating the already-screened references in EndNote prior to import.

If you conduct snowballing (AKA citation searching or reference chasing) as part of your systematic review process, the PRISMA 2020 flow diagram may be causing you headaches. In the new flow diagram, snowballed results are reported in the right hand side of the diagram, "Identification of studies via other methods." Michelle Demetres of the Samuel J. Wood Library at Weill Cornell Medicine has contributed this tip on how to track snowballed references in Covidence.

  1. The team must be completely finished with their first round of full text screening in Covidence. 
    1. Import snowballing references into title/abstract. 
    2. Click "All" at the top. This will select all your newly imported references. 
    3. Click "Tags" and type Snowballing, click create new. 
    4. You should now see all new references have been tagged with "Snowballing." 
  2. As usual, have the team let you know when they are ready for full text with this set. If nothing made it there, you're done! If not, make note in your documentation of HOW MANY. 
  3. Once the team is finished with full text screening, you'll need to run an export. 
    1. Click on "Export"
    2. In the left-most box "References," select "Excluded" for Stage and "CSV" for Format. 
    3. Once you open the downloaded file, you should be able to see if any "Snowballing" tagged studies were excluded and for what reason.
null

Image description for screen reader users:

  • Citation searching = total number from snowballing 
  • Reports sought for retrieval = Total number from snowballing in full text
  • Reports not retrieved = Number for which you couldn't locate full text
  • Reports assessed for eligibility = Total number from snowballing for which full text was reviewed
  • Reports excluded = Exclusion reasons from Covidence export



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Tip #1: Bulk export from Google Scholar

By
Image
This post was updated on October 10, 2022 with new instructions for #3 under "For EndNote users..." For years, I kept hearing from colleagues that I should be searching Google Scholar as part of my systematic review projects. I didn't, for 3 reasons: I didn't know GS' search syntax GS notoriously does not allow bulk export to reference managers I didn't have a sense of how many results I should export.   Last fall, I finally said enough was enough and it was time to learn how to wrangle this beast. It turns out that there is now a third-party tool that facilitates bulk export from Google Scholar, Harzing's Publish or Perish . Here's how you get started: Download PoP for free Paste your query into the Keywords field Set your maximum number of results. I follow the guidelines on p. 135 of Wichor Bramer's dissertation , which is a great handbook for expert searching. Bramer suggests the first 200 results, or 100 if you are getting low numbers of res
Read more

Tip #46: Exporting Records from Clinicaltrials.gov into EndNote

By
Image
Many thanks to Ben Harnke, MLIS from the Strauss Health Sciences Library, University of Colorado (ben.harnke@cuanschutz.edu) for this week's tip!   Overview The following are instructions to export records from clincicaltrials.gov (Trials) to EndNote, with the ultimate goal of sending the records to a screening software, namely Covidence. The new Trials website ( https://www.clinicaltrials.gov /) will only export in JSON (Java Script format) and Comma Separated Values (CSV) formats. We will be using the CSV export format, the format for spreadsheets. These instructions are simply slight modifications to the Clarivate instructions for importing tab-delimited files (spreadsheets) into EndNote. Before proceeding with the following instructions, first decide whether it is necessary to export directly from clinicaltrials.gov to begin with. Cochrane CENTRAL contains records from Trials and is more user friendly. CENTRAL is limited to "randomized and quasi-randomized controlled tri
Read more

Favorite Features & Sneaky Solutions: A Database Tips Lightning Round: View the recording!

By
On October 7, 2024, the Medical Library Association's User Experience (UX) Caucus held a database tips lightning round. Watch the entire event recording! MLA UX Caucus Database Tips Lightning Round * (October 2024)  View presenter slide decks, the full chat transcript, and a summary of Q&A and tips culled from the chat: Lightning Round documents  (October 2024) The presenters and their topics, with timestamps of when they appear in the video, were: Methodology and Publication Type Filters in EBSCOhost Databases (00:40) Marilia Antunez, MA (LIS), MA,  Life & Allied Health Sciences Librarian, Associate Professor, The University of Akron (OH) Tricky Truncation in ProQuest Databases (07:15) Jocelyn Boice, Associate Professor / Collection Strategies and Data Analysis Librarian, Colorado State University Libraries Embase Query Translator (12:52) Molly Higgins, Systematic Review Librarian, USDA NESR What’s Included in Emtree’s /syn and /br (19:20) Amy Nadell, MSLIS, MA , AHIP-D, L
Read more