Cochrane Style Manual
Titles of Cochrane reviews

Titles for all types of Cochrane reviews should be in sentence case. 

Avoid the use of abbreviations (except for those listed as common abbreviations that do not need to be defined, see Abbreviations and acronyms).

Avoid superfluous elements, such as ‘effects of’, ‘comparison of’, ‘a systematic review of’. However, 

  • titles of review overviews should end, 'an overview of Cochrane reviews' or 'an overview of Cochrane systematic reviews' or 'an overview of systematic reviews;
  • titles of qualitative evidence syntheses should end, 'a qualitative evidence synthesis'.

Titles can include italics (see section on Character formatting) but no other formatting.

Titles do not have a full-stop at the end.

Guidance on the structure of titles for Cochrane reviews of interventions is included in the Cochrane Handbook for Systematic Reviews of Interventions.

Section info
Contact
Denise Mitchell (production@cochrane.org)
Describe change
Adjusted 'Cochrane Review' to 'Cochrane review'.
Information added about overviews and QES reviews.
Link to 'common abbreviations that do not need to be defined' changed to section not general heading
Broken link to Abbreviations and acronyms fixed
Typo corrected
Change date
26 June 2024