Preparing a Cochrane Review
– this is done in 'stages' following a defined process.
Firstly, the authors work with a disease or health condition based Cochrane Review Group to develop a review question outlined in a title for a Cochrane review.
Registered title: is an official record of an
author's intent to prepare a Cochrane review on a specific topic.
The authors then set up a road map or protocol that sets out how they are going to carry out the review the healthcare condition; the people in whom this intervention is used; what it is compared to; the outcomes from the intervention that are to be looked at; and how any findings are managed. Compare it with a GPS Global positioning navigation system but for developing a Cochrane review – telling you where to go and how.
The protocol is looked at by a number of people involved with the Cochrane Review Group (peer review) before it is copy edited and published in The Cochrane Library as:
Protocol: the detailed
roadmap or plan for the preparation of a Cochrane review. This is found only in the full-text (subscribed) view of The Cochrane Library, and includes details of the research question and data extraction methods.
Once the protocol is published the authors then follow their defined process to look for clinical studies fitting their criteria (the streets); extract the data of each study and pool or synthesise them, if the studies are carried out in a similar enough way. This is called a meta-analysis.
Once the draft review is completed, it is again looked at by a number of people involved with the Cochrane Review Group (peer reviewed) before being copy edited and published in The Cochrane Library as:
Review: The review is published review with precise methods, results, and conclusions. The plain language summary (a short synopsis) and the abstract (a page or so) are found free-of-charge on Cochrane.org and www.theCochraneLibrary.com, while the full-text version (including meta-analyses) is available only to subscribers of The Cochrane Library.
Flags'New': Cochrane reviews or protocols appearing for the first time in the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews (the core database of The Cochrane Library). The database is published quarterly, and a 'new' flag disappears with the release of the following issue.
'Updated': Cochrane reviews or protocols containing 'substantive updates' (as defined by the responsible review group) since the last issue. The date of these changes is reflected in the 'date of last substantive amendment' appearing in the header of the review.
'Withdrawn': Sometimes reviews must be removed entirely from the database. Grounds for such removal can be viewed in the subscribed view of The Cochrane Library.
About Peer Reviewers for Cochrane Review Groups