Improvements to RevMan – making the improvements you requested
We have always worked with our author community to identify improvements we can make. The introduction of RevMan Web has been carefully designed to deal with some of the key challenges and issues with RevMan 5 that our authors have raised with us.
Here, we show how some of your issues have now been resolved. Please do drop us a line if you encounter a problem, by emailing support@cochrane.org
What you’ve told us and what we’ve done…
“RevMan isn’t integrated with Covidence or Excel, so there is lots of copy and pasting to get your data in RevMan, which means a lot of room for error”
You can now import to RevMan Web from Covidence and Excel using templates and this can be used as the basis for your data extraction forms. Covidence also has an ‘export this’ format and has improved data extraction to support effect estimates reported as contrast data (data reported as between arms rather than for each specific arm).
“Adding data manually to every analysis in RevMan takes a long time and it’s easy to make a mistake!”
RevMan Web has study-level data management (also referred to as study-centric data). Once you have set up your PICOs, studies and analyses, you only need to add or amend the results data at the study level and it automatically adds or updates all analyses with that result.
“Will there be any issues for people in those countries with less stable internet access when using RevMan Web?”
We have looked a usage data and are contacting some of our Geographic Groups that host author training in lower & middle-income countries to ensure they have no specific concerns. If you experience or are concerned about internet issues, please contact support@cochrane.org so we can investigate.
“It's annoying when only one author can work on the review at one time”
In RevMan Web, multiple authors can now work collaboratively on a review at the same time.
“I work on reviews of diagnostic test accuracy, and I don’t think those can be accessed in RevMan Web”
The good news is that RevMan Web now supports all Cochrane review types; intervention, diagnostic test accuracy, methodology, overviews and flexible reviews.
“I've been using the RevMan 5 file to import data into tools such as GRADEpro and Covidence, and then back into RevMan. What can I do now?”
The old RevMan 5 format will be replaced by a set of files with standard formats such as CSV and RIS. (Please note: after April you will not be able to use the RevMan 5 file for these workflows for Cochrane reviews and RevMan Web will not export or import RevMan 5 files.)
“I need to use the Risk of Bias 2 tool and it’s not currently available in RevMan 5”
RevMan Web is now optimized for using the Risk of Bias 2 tool.
“RevMan5 isn’t optimised for GRADEpro GDT integration”
There is now integration with GRADEpro GDT for intervention reviews. It allows you to pull in the analysis data from RevMan Web and synchronize the SoF as you make edits in GRADEpro.
