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COVIDENCE User Guide

What is Data Extraction?

In a review, data extraction is the process of systematically gathering and structuring key information from included studies—such as study design, participant characteristics, interventions, outcomes, and results—into a standardized format, typically a table. This step enables efficient analysis and synthesis of evidence across studies by organizing relevant data for comparison and summary.

While Covidence provides the means by which you can organize your collected data, it does not provide a method of analyzing that data, so keep that in mind. Once the data is collected from your included articles, you will be able to export it and apply statistical analysis, coding, visualization, etc., with programs of your choice.

Extraction Templates

Data extraction is nuanced to your project, and the data extraction template you use will depend on the type of review you're conducting and what data you want to gather and report on.

Covidence offers 2 data extraction templates, both of which are customizable to your review. Once gathered, the data can be exported for further analysis, but those export methods vary between the two templates.

 

Comparison between extraction 1 and 2