NVivo and Covidence: NVivo for qualitative data analysis [KUB Datalab]

NVivo and Covidence

Conducting a review can be a substantial task, and therefore, it is advisable to perform a literature screening of the materials you have gathered. In the screening process you decide and document which texts to include in or exclude from your review and why. This process is best done outside of NVivo and can, for instance, be done using the screening tool Covidence. As a student or an employee at Copenhagen University, you have access to Covidence.

In essence, you upload your texts from your chosen reference manager to Covidence. Duplicates are identified and removed. Then you filter out the articles that you won't need for your review, and by doing this in Covidence, you avoid importing a large number of articles into NVivo that you would eventually have to delete. Another advantage of using Covidence is that it is specifically designed for article screening. You set up include and exclude criteria, can quickly skim the title, abstracts and full-texts of your papers and can invite a co-reviewer as to increase the objectivity of the screening process.

Workflow in relation to reference management

Exporting references from Covidence

You can not import directly from Covidence to NVivo, so it is necessary to first export the content from Covidence to a reference management program. Once this is done, it can be imported into NVivo.

Image of duplicate handling in Covidence.

To transfer articles from Covidence into NVivo, you first need to extract them from Covidence. This is done using Covidence's export function. It's important in this context to select "Data Extraction". If you choose Quality Assessment, a CSV file is generated, which cannot be exported to a reference management program.

Then, select the reference management program you wish to export to.

You should be aware that any metadata, such as your inclusion and exclusion criteria or notes you've made while reading the texts in Covidence, will not be exported to the reference management program and therefore will not be transferred to NVivo. You do though have a set of articles that you know you want to analyse further in your review.

If you update your text corpus in Covidence and find more papers you want to include in your review - don't worry. When you import into NVivo via your reference manager, duplicate texts that are already in your NVivo project are not imported.