Handbook Advisory Group (HAG)
report to CCSG meeting, Providence, April 2005

 

submitted by Julian Higgins and Sally Green

1.      How many meetings, and of what type (e.g. face-to-face, by teleconference), has your Advisory Group had since October 2004? 

 

One face to face meeting at the Ottawa Colloquium; convenors/ editors meet by teleconference once a month; and the plain language summaries working group has met once by teleconference and once face to face.

Is this what you expected when you set your budget for the year?

Yes

 

2.      Supply an up-to-date list of the members of your Advisory Group.

Lisa Askie               Editorial board/ Reviewer

Chris Cates             Editorial board/ Co-ordinating editor

Mike Clarke             Editorial board

Jon Deeks               Editorial board [CCSG representative]

Matthias Egger        Editorial board

Sally Green             Co-Convenor/Co-Editor

Julian Higgins          Co-Convenor/Co-Editor

Alex Jadad              Editorial board

Philippa Middleton    Editorial board

Jim Neilson             [CCSG representative]

Jacob Riis               Technical support

Convenors               All Cochrane Methods Groups

Member                  Adverse Events Sub-Group

Member                  Methodology Review Group

                              Review Group Co-ordinator

                              Trials Search Co-ordinator

                              Field Convenor

 

3.      Summarise any significant actions taken by your Advisory Group since your last report (for the CCSG meeting in Ottawa in October 2004), and significant actions planned for the next six months until the next meeting of the CCSG in Melbourne in October 2005.

 

3.1.Actions in last 6 months:

 

3.1.1.                    Phil Alderson resigned as editor and co-convenor of HAG. We are grateful to Phil for the enormous contribution he made to the Handbook.

3.1.2.                    Updated Sections 1 and 2 of the Handbook (signed off by HAG and incorporated into Issue 2, 2005)

3.1.3.                    Updated Section 3 (incorporating Appendix 2A). This is being reviewed by HAG and will be included in Issue 3, 2005

3.1.4.                    Ongoing work with the Health Promotion and Public Health Field to incorporate their Guidelines into the Handbook. Some of these have been revised for inclusion into the core Handbook as they relate to all reviews, and some will form a separate Appendix, specific to HPPH reviews

3.1.5.                    Updated Section 8 to change all use of the term ‘reviewer’ to ‘author’

3.1.6.                    Surveyed the Collaboration, compiled and modified a list of suggested terms to change (see Section 4 of this report)

3.1.7.                  Worked with a subgroup to develop the guidance for review authors and CRGs for plain language summaries. This has been reported separately to this report as part of a paper from CCNet. We hope this meeting will approve this guidance.

 

3.2.Planned Actions for next 6 months

 

3.2.1.                    Finalise Adverse Effects Chapter. We have been working with the Adverse effects subgroup of the non-randomised studies methods group and a final draft is to be circulated to all HAG members for comment

3.2.2.                    Recruit an RGC, TSC and Field representative to HAG (CCSG reps have been approached to help us with this)

3.2.3.                    Convene a trial quality meeting to inform update of Section 6 (this is funded from a separate proposal as part of the series of projects approved at the Ottawa meeting). The meeting is scheduled for May 2005 in Cambridge

3.2.4.                    Update Section 10 in conjunction with the working party investigating the problem of updating reviews

3.2.5.                    Continue to work to a timeline to update the Handbook to meet the requirements and deadline of the release of Revman 5. We will explore the publishing of the Handbook as a book subsequent to this.

 

4.      Does your Advisory Group have any questions that you would like the Steering Group to answer?  If so, please list them.

 

4.1              A list of recommended terms for changing is appended as a table. These have been recommended by survey of the Collaboration and discussed by HAG (some suggestions were removed as part of this process). Does the CCSG approve these changes in terminology?

4.2              HAG would like approval or further guidance on the Guidance for Plain Language Summaries. This is presented as part of the discussion paper from CCNet. The guidance has been circulated to HAG and comments incorporated.

 

5.      Does your Advisory Group wish to raise any problems, and recommended solutions, which you would like the Steering Group to discuss?  If so, please list them. 

 

All issues covered elsewhere in this report

6.      Do you foresee any problems in keeping within the budget you submitted for the current financial year (April 2004 to March 2005)? 

 

The report below demonstrates that we are under budget for 2004/5:

 

Description of item	Budgeted cost 2004/5 in Pounds	Expected cost
Staff costs
0.1 whole time equivalent (plus employer’s costs) for Phil Alderson	9,438	7,079 (Note 1)
0.2 whole time equivalent (plus employer’s costs) of Nicola Thornton’s time	5,785	5,785
Non-staff costs
Teleconferences	1,000	250 (Note 2)
Budget for meeting of Handbook update working group meeting in Oxford 12/6/04	2,000	599.70
Fund for ensuring up-to-date content for the Handbook	5,000	0 (Note 3)
Total	23,223	13,714

 

Note 1: Phil Alderson left the UKCC on 31^st December 2004, so this figure has been reduced to 9/12 of the budgeted amount.

Note 2: This is an estimated amount for the full year based on costs to date. teleconference costs have been minimised by using the UKCC’s own telephone system rather than a commercial conference organiser.

Note 3: HAG decided that this money might be used to fund authors of sections of the Handbook to travel to a place more conducive to this work, e.g. a Cochrane Centre, or a relevant colleague.

 

7.      What are your budgetary requirements for the period April 2005 to March 2006?  Please provide a breakdown if appropriate.  (As a reminder, the Steering Group sets the budget for each Group at its non-Colloquium meeting.)

 

Budget Request for 2005/6

 

Description of item	Budgeted cost in Pounds
Staff costs
0.2 whole time equivalent (plus employer’s costs) of Nicola Thornton’s time	6,000
Non-staff costs
Teleconferences	250
Fund for ensuring up-to-date content for the Handbook	5,000
Total	11,250

 

Justification

 

Nicola Thornton’s role in the administration and technical production of the Handbook has, we feel, made an important difference to progress with the Handbook. She has provided a central point of contact for the co-editors, and ensured that progress with tasks is monitored, teleconferences organised, etc.

 

She has also, with support from Jacob Riis, streamlined production of the different versions of the Handbook using a computer package called Robohelp. This enables maintenance of a single source file for all versions of the Handbook (Word, pdf, html and help) and is an important quality control mechanism.

 

Phil Alderson will no longer be a co-editor of the Handbook, but we feel that Nicola’s expertise and experience should be retained. We are not aware of anyone else with Robohelp expertise. Having discussed the function of HAG, we are content that the administrative arrangements will work at a distance from the two remaining co-editors.

 TERMINOLOGY CHANGES: For CCSG meeting, Providence

 

 

Term to change	Suggestion for change to	Reason for change
Collaboration-wide
Collaborative Review Group	Cochrane Review Group	Collaborative doesn’t add information, and has been argued to be unclear to non-native-English speakers.
Comments and Criticisms	Feedback	Preferred by many.
Peer reviewer	Referee	In the past peer reviewer has obviously been confused with reviewer but it is a cumbersome term anyway.
[none]	Specific categories for referees (or peer reviewers): e.g. ·         Content expert referee ·         Methodology referee ·         Statistical referee ·         Consumer referee ·         Internal referee ·         External referee	This may be particularly useful in the contacts database. For example, pulling together a team of referees for a review, one may want to know what are the specialties of the referees.
For RevMan and the Handbook, with implications for the text of reviews
Treatment	Intervention	Intervention is more appropriate as a generic term. This should particularly impact on labels in RevMan.
Search strategy	Search strategy [when referring to the actual list of terms used in a search]	For clarity. (from Information Retrieval Methods Group)
Search strategy	Search methods [when referring to the overall ‘strategy’, which might include reference databases, grey literature, contacting compacies etc]	For clarity. (from Information Retrieval Methods Group)
Weighted mean difference (WMD)	Mean difference (MD)	Current terminology inaccurate. (from Statistical Methods Group)
Relative risk (RR)	Risk ratio (RR)	For consistency and clarity. (from Statistical Methods Group)
Control event rate (CER)	Control group risk (CGR)	Current term potentially misleading. (from Statistical Methods Group)
Number needed to treat (NNT)	Number needed to treat to benefit (NNTB)	For clarity. from Statistical Methods Group)
Number needed to harm (NNH)	Number needed to treat to harm (NNTH)	For clarity. (from Statistical Methods Group)
IPD [as a data type in RevMan]	O-E and Variance	Current term inaccurate.   (from Statistical Methods Group)