Skip to Main Content

SOCW 553: Research Knowledge and Evidence in Clinical Social Work Practice

Overview of evidence-based practice, literature review/systematic review workflows, and citation management for your written EBP assignment.

Covidence Account Setup

UBC has a subscription to Covidence - so that UBC students and researchers do not need to pay for personal subscriptions. Please follow these steps to set up an account under the UBC subscription.

  1. Ensure you have ubc.ca email address -- this can be a student email address
  2. Go to the UBC subscription sign up page: https://www.covidence.org/organizations/3MGyQ/signup
  3. Fill out your name and ubc.ca email address, and click Request Invitation 
  4. A request will be sent to the email address you listed
    • NOTE: If you have email forwarding turned on in your alumni email address, this request email may take longer to deliver. Do not turn off forwarding to get the email faster, this will block the email from ever getting to you. 
  5. Accept the request via email and follow any further prompts
  6. To verify that your account was linked to UBC's subscription properly - hover over your name in the top right-hand corner when you are logged into Covidence, if the University of British Columbia is listed under Your Organizations, you know the setup was completed correctly.

For more help, email me or go to the UBC subscription setup page: https://support.covidence.org/help/the-university-of-british-columbia

Creating a Review

To create a review in Covidence for your group assignment, make sure you designated one group member to set it up - they will then invite the other group members and your applicable professor to the review.

To set up a new review in Covidence:

  • Log in to your account
  • Select Start a New Review
  • Leave Are you Creating a Cochrane Review? set to No
  • Name your Review
  • Ensure you select University of British Columbia so that the review is associated with the UBC subscription
  • Click Create Review

Once you've created your review, you'll want to configure the settings (see below for instructions on each section of the Settings). 

Settings for Your Review

It is important to go over the settings of your review with your entire group - as you'll be completing the work in Covidence together. 

Editing the Review Settings:

  • Edit the name of your review as necessary 
  • Date and Search Strategy - you can include your group's date of search, database names, search terms, and limiters here, or you can include this in a separate document (e.g. Excel or Word) depending on the level of detail your search has. 
  • Ensure Reviewers for Screening and Reviewers for Full Text Review are both set to 2

Your designated group member creating the review will be adding the the following to your review:

  • All group members
  • Professor for your course section

To Invite Others to a Review:

  • In Settings, select the Add/Remove Reviewers
  • Click Select Another Reviewer on the right-hand side
  • Add other reviewers using the designated email addresses they used to create their accounts

Since everyone in your group will be completing screening work at each phase, we will be leaving the settings for your review open to everyone. 

This page is also where your group's work will be documented - it will display the completed screening by each group member. 

Selecting Team Settings:

  • Under Settings, select Team Settings
  • Ensure that under Rules, for both Title & Abstract Screening and Full Text Review, Everyone Can Do Everything is selected

This is the space where your group will get to note down all of your eligibility criteria and your group's pre-prepared reasons for exclusion. This will guide all of the group members when they are screening the abstracts and the full-text - in case a group member forgets whether a certain element was included or excluded.

The reasons you list on this page will be available to pop-open when you are screening. 

Adding Eligibility Criteria (Inclusion/Exclusion):

  • Under Settings, select Criteria & Exclusion Reasons
  • Add Inclusion and Exclusion criteria pre-determined by your group to each applicable box. You can write this as a paragraph or a list.

Adding Reasons for Exclusion of Full-Text:

  • Under Settings, select Criteria & Exclusion Reasons
  • Click the Manage Exclusion Reasons for Full Text Review section - a pop-up will open
  • Add/remove exclusion reasons - there is already a common list of reasons pre-populated, but there is no requirement to use any of these. Create custom reasons as your group needs.
  • Click Done

Study tags are a feature in Covidence that your group does not have to use, unless you feel it would be helpful. 

Setting up Study Tags:

  • Under Settings, select Study Tags
  • Add tags that might be helpful for your group to use when tagging articles. This might be tied to themes your group wants to analyze later, when there may be common notes between more than one article screened. 
  • Tags are searchable later, while Notes are not. 

If your group wants to add notes to individual articles, there is also that feature - which may be a better option than tags. Use what works best for your group!