While the Cochrane Colloquium didn’t go ahead as planned, the Cochrane Crowd Colloquium Challenge went ahead and gave us all a chance to come together, albeit virtually. As you can see in our promotional image, we’d set our target at 20,000 classifications across 48 hours.

And guess what happened? We actually reached three times that amount! What an outrageous and wonderful amount of energy you all have! In total, 61,774 classifications were made by 103 people living in 29 countries around the world. And participants identified around 1,500 RCTS!

Congratulations go especially to our top three screeners, Abhijna Vithal Yergolkar, Hariklia Nguyen and Abhijit Dutta. Thank you for your brilliant efforts and a prize pack will be making its way to you shortly. Hariklia has written the piece below especially for this blog.

My piece for the Cochrane Crowd citation screening challenge blog post

I was thrilled that I was one of the three top screeners! I would like to share that this challenge required special effort on my part because as I was participating I was also managing symptoms of Dystonia, a Neurological Movement Disorder. I wanted to share this to inspire other people with medical conditions to also get involved with Cochrane’s work and Cochrane Crowd challenges. And to say “congratulations” to other participants in the challenge who were also managing medical issues while working to make a difference.

The following encouraged me in this challenge:

• I wanted to make a difference! Identifying studies that health researchers and practitioners can access which in turn can help with treatments for patients or consumers
• Achieving something significant despite the disadvantage of living with a medical condition
• My cheering squad! (Australian Dystonia Support Group admins)  – Thanks for your support!
• Achieving while representing Australia!
• Eating chocolate as a reward while screening!

 Thank you to Cochrane for this great opportunity and congratulations to the other winners!

And if that wasn't enough excitement, we’re doing it all over again for the virtual Cochrane Santiago conference! Join us for the COCHRANE COLLOQUIUM CHALLENGE 2019! More info coming soon.
 

You can email Emily and Anna from Cochrane Crowd at crowd@cochrane.org. And don’t forget to follow us on Twitter!