We seek nominations to fill two vacant positions on the new Cochrane Methods Executive, to start in September 2018 at the Edinburgh Colloquium.

The new Methods Executive will take on more strategic responsibility supporting the Scientific Committee with its agenda, the Editorial Board on issues with methods implementation, and seeks to improve communication between different Cochrane structures with related methods interests, and the Methods Groups. The new Methods Executive will:

• Provide Cochrane with expertise advising on the state of the evidence for evidence synthesis methods;
• Engage with the strategic infra-structure supporting the Editor in Chief on content developments and future strategy;
• Ensure Cochrane has relevant intelligence on new and improved methods;
• Provide oversight aiding decisions on methods for use in Cochrane Reviews, methods for expert review and evaluation, and methods we should not use;
• Identify methods that fit with the priorities of decision-makers, guideline developers and other stakeholders to aid decision-making;
• Advise and support any experimental approaches in collaboration with the Editor in Chief and the Editorial Board;
• Maintain methods infra-structure by overseeing the Methods Groups and their Lead Convenors.

Executive constituency

We currently have two vacant positions for Methods Groups Convenors. The current Methods Executive is comprised of eight elected Methods Group Convenors.  In its new format the Methods Executive will see methodologists from the following roles represented: Senior Methods Adviser to the Editorial Board; Handbook Editor; Scientific Committee member and a member from the Cochrane Council.

The new Methods Executive also holds six positions for elected Methods Group convenors. Four of the current Convenors will remain to provide continuity and will step down over the next two years to allow the election of new members. Both the Methods Co-ordinator and Head of Membership, Learning and Support services will serve Ex Officio roles.

Experience required

The Methods Executive seeks two experienced, well-established Methods Group Convenors. They will have strong connections within the Cochrane community. Along with their specialist expertise they will be skilled in systematic review methodology. Experience of similar committees is an advantage. Methods expertise on the new Methods Executive currently covers diagnostic test accuracy, GRADE, information retrieval, qualitative evidence synthesis and statistics, so we particularly encourage members from other Methods Groups to step forward.

Commitment required

We expect members to attend meetings regularly, typically every 6-8 weeks, usually by teleconference with two face-to-face meetings twice a year. We also expect them to contribute to issues that arise by e-mail between meetings.  We currently fund travel and accommodation to attend the Mid-Year Governance meetings. We also fund travel and 3 nights' accommodation to attend Methods Executive-related meetings at Colloquia. (We do not fund Colloquium registration. Methods Executive members are expected to make use of the one complimentary registration per group or seek funding from their employer, or elsewhere).

The deadline for nominations is Friday 13 July 2018. To find out more and to apply, please visit Cochrane Methods.

Which is harder: getting kids to eat more fruit and vegetables, or maintaining the Cochrane living systematic review of the rapidly growing evidence base on how to get kids to eat more fruit and vegetables? This year, a magnificent team led by Rebecca Hodder based at Australia’s University of Newcastle has proved that the latter can be done.

The official pilot period for four living systematic reviews (LSRs) ends in June, and the Project Transform LSR team has been collecting rich process evaluation data to provide insights into the workload and workflow implications of adopting a living approach to systematic reviews and inform decisions about the future of LSRs in Cochrane. The LSR team looks forward to sharing the full results of the LSR pilot evaluation with the Cochrane community in Edinburgh. Slides from a recent webinar offer a sneak preview of some of the practical experiences of two of the LSR pilot teams.

One of the LSRs, ‘Interventions for increasing fruit and vegetable consumption in children aged five years and under,’ received additional support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation as part of a broader Next Generation Evidence Systems project. This support has enabled the LSR team, working with Cochrane Heart and Project Transform’s machine learning and Cochrane Crowd citizen science platforms, to develop an automated workflow identifying RCTs from their monthly search results. With the help of this technology and a collaborative editorial and publishing approach, the team has published two updates since the start of the year, incorporating a total of 13 new studies since moving into living mode late 2017.

“There are definitely workload and project management challenges to adopting a living approach to systematic reviews” says Rebecca Hodder, lead of the LSR Interventions for increasing fruit and vegetable consumption in children aged five years and under. “Overall we found that maintaining the monthly searches and applying the RCT technology was much easier than anticipated. We’d advise any author team thinking about embarking on an LSR to seek out LSR expertise, adopt a strong project management approach and develop collaborative partnerships with your Information Specialist and editorial team.”

The experiences of the four LSR pilot teams and Cochrane editorial staff are an important contribution to the development of a methodologically robust and achievable model for Cochrane living systematic reviews. Rebecca’s team are leading the way and showing it can be done. Getting kids to eat more fruit and vegetables though? Now, that is still a major challenge!

Hodder RK, O'Brien KM, Stacey FG, Wyse RJ, Clinton-McHarg T, Tzelepis F, James EL, Bartlem KM, Nathan NK, Sutherland R, Robson E, Yoong SL, Wolfenden L. Interventions for increasing fruit and vegetable consumption in children aged five years and under. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews 2018, Issue 5. Art. No.: CD008552. DOI: 10.1002/14651858.CD008552.pub5

• Learn more about LSR

Support for Project Transform was provided by Cochrane and the National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia (APP1114605). The contents of the published material are solely the responsibility of the Administering Institution, a Participating Institution or individual authors and do not reflect the views of the NHMRC.

Support for the Next Generation Evidence Systems project was provided by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect the views of the Foundation.

Living systematic reviews (LSRs) provide a new approach to support the ongoing efforts of Cochrane and others to produce evidence that is both trustworthy and current. Four author teams and editorial groups across Cochrane are currently involved in the pilot and evaluation of LSRs. The pilot will help us understand the feasibility of LSRs, the implications for the people and processes involved and identify opportunities to refine the LSR model before scaling up.

Living systematic reviews on venous thromboembolism

A team led by Elie Akl, American University of Beirut, and Holger Schünemann, McMaster University in Canada, working with Cochrane Gynaecological, Neuro-oncology and Orphan Cancers, is currently maintaining a suite of three Cochrane LSRs that will underpin guidelines by the American Society of Hematology (ASH) on the prevention and treatment of venous thromboembolism (VTE) in patients with cancer. ASH funded the work as part of a larger collaborative project with the McMaster University GRADE Centre to develop 10 guidelines on VTE (see press release here: American Society of Hematology—University of McMaster Clinical Practice Guidelines on Venous Thromboembolism).

The following Cochrane Reviews on VTE in patients with cancer are now being maintained as LSRs:

• Parenteral anticoagulation in ambulatory patients with cancer
• Oral anticoagulation in patients with cancer who have no therapeutic or prophylactic indication for anticoagulation
• Anticoagulation for the long-term treatment of venous thromboembolism in patients with cancer

The ASH guidelines are expected to be published in 2018. Similar to systematic reviews, guideline recommendations become outdated at variables rates. Increasingly, guideline developers internationally are starting to explore new processes and tools for timely update of recommendations, or for living guidelines. While there remains much to be explored about the living guideline model, a necessary prerequisite is the availability of LSR(s). ASH has begun discussions with the Cochrane team about using these LSRs to pilot a living guideline model.

Such a model “presents both opportunities and challenges,” says Rob Kunkle, Senior Manager of Guidelines at ASH. “Clinicians and patients need up-to-date guidance, especially on topics or questions where new evidence is likely to change a recommendation. At the same time, we need to figure out a surveillance and updating approach that is practical for our society to do, for our journal to publish, and for our guideline users to understand and implement. We look forward to exploring different approaches.”  

You can check for updates to these and Cochrane’s other LSRs in the What’s New section of these reviews on the Cochrane Library, and soon Cochrane will be capturing this information via its amended Update Classification System.

With these reviews now published in living mode, Elie and team can start the exciting work of testing how Cochrane’s living evidence can flow into living guideline recommendations. Elie says, “While we’ve been discussing living systematic reviews and living guidelines for few years now, it is exciting that we are contributing to making this happen. It wouldn’t have been possible without great partners, like Cochrane and the American Society of Haematology”.

• Learn more about LSRs

Support for Project Transform was provided by Cochrane and the National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia (APP1114605). The contents of the published material are solely the responsibility of the Administering Institution, a Participating Institution or individual authors and do not reflect the views of the NHMRC.

The Cochrane Council exists to give Cochrane Members, from a broad range of constituencies, a voice in Cochrane’s future. The purpose of the Council is to provide:

• A forum for Cochrane Groups and Members to consider high-level matters affecting Cochrane as a whole;
• A mechanism to raise matters and provide input to the Governing Board on behalf of Cochrane Groups and Members; and
• A forum to consider matters at the request of the Board and inform Board deliberations.

Following the recent retirement of Author representative Julie Brown, the Council is seeking to elect a new member to join fellow Author rep María Ximena Rojas Reyes.

Any Cochrane Member who has published at least one Cochrane Review in the Cochrane Library is eligible to stand for election. Your name must be listed in the Authors section of the Cochrane Review, but you do not have to be lead/correspondence Author on the Review.

This is a voluntary, unpaid role and each year you’ll need to commit to attending two face-to-face meetings at different locations internationally and regular teleconferences. Your expenses will be paid. The term of appointment is three years, from August 2018 to August 2021, and you should be available to attend the Cochrane Colloquium in Edinburgh this September.

Cochrane’s Governing Board is seeking to elect a new member. Cochrane is an international organisation and a registered charity in the UK, and members of the Governing Board from around the world are ‘Trustees’ of the charity. The Trustees carry ultimate responsibility for Cochrane and this is a critically important role. More information about being a Trustee of a UK charity is available from the UK Charity Commission. 

This is an exciting opportunity to join an international team providing strategic oversight to Cochrane, making sure the organisation’s work is effective and innovative, and that it delivers on its mission to promote evidence-informed health decision making by producing high-quality, relevant, accessible systematic reviews and other synthesised research evidence.

Candidates must be Cochrane Members. We welcome nominations from individuals with the skills required to fulfil the responsibilities of a Trustee. We are especially seeking candidates who have one or more of the following areas of expertise, in order to complement those of existing Board members:

• Financial management
• Organisational governance
• Human Resources management/management of people
• Legal experience
• Knowledge translation/transfer and communication
• Consumer engagement
• Evidence-informed health care or policy

In line with the usual requirements for UK charity Trustees, this is a voluntary, unpaid role. Each year you will need to commit to attending two face-to-face meetings at different locations internationally, and at least three teleconferences.  You will be expected to be a member of one or more Board Sub-Committees. Your expenses will be paid to attend these meetings. The term of appointment is three years, from August 2018 to August 2021, and you should be available to attend the Cochrane Colloquium in Edinburgh this September.

The deadline for nominations is Sunday 15 July 2018. To find out more, please visit elections.cochrane.org.

Cochrane’s Governing Board is delighted to announce it has appointed Marguerite Koster as its new Co-Chair, taking over from Cindy Farquhar, who finishes her term in September 2018.

Marguerite is a Senior Manager at Kaiser Permanente, one of the largest not-for-profit health plans in the U.S., serving 12.2 million members. She oversees the efforts of the Southern California Permanente Medical Group’s Evidence-Based Medicine Services Unit within Kaiser Permanente’s Southern California Region, which provides medical care to 4.5 million members.

She joined Cochrane’s Governing Board in 2016 as one of its first externally appointed members following its transition from a Steering Group, and has since played an active role as a Cochrane Trustee, serving as Treasurer, Chair of the Finance, Audit & Investment Subcommittee, and a member of the Remuneration Subcommittee and the Cochrane/G-I-N Partnership Advisory Group. In addition, Marguerite brings valuable experience to the Board in clinical practice guideline development, health technology assessment, knowledge translation and evidence-based implementation.

From September she will work alongside fellow Co-Chair, Martin Burton. The Board extends its congratulations to Marguerite, and thanks to Cindy Farquhar for four years of outstanding service as Co-Chair.

Additional resources:

• Governing Board membership
• Full list of meeting minutes and open access papers.

Cochrane Classmate could change how evidence production is taught in classrooms around the world.

Brought to you by the Cochrane Crowd team, Classmate is a trainers’ toolkit that allows you to create exciting, interactive tasks that help your students learn about evidence production. It is easy to use, and its first release is now available free of charge to anyone interested. Join the growing number of teachers and trainers using this innovative online learning environment.

This webinar will introduce you to Classmate, including how to create a learning activity, invite students to that activity, and monitor their progress.  You’ll see the modules currently available on Classmate and hear about others launching soon.

Tuesday 17th July 12.30-1.30pm AEST

Visit the Cochrane Classmate website

Support for Project Transform was provided by Cochrane and the National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia (APP1114605). The contents of the published material are solely the responsibility of the Administering Institution, a Participating Institution or individual authors and do not reflect the views of the NHMRC.

It is with pleasure, and a little trepidation, that we announce the launch of the Cochrane Crowd PICO task.

Building on the randomised trial identification task, this new task asks you to help describe the trial. In order to do that we’ve adopted a well-known framework called PICO. PICO stands for Population, Intervention, Comparator, and Outcome.

Why develop such a task?

One of the biggest challenges we face in our efforts to turn information into knowledge about treatments, is keeping up with the sheer volume of research produced. Over 4000 health-related articles are published each day. When we need to find studies to help answer questions about the effectiveness of treatments, researchers and information specialists are faced with having to wade through potentially thousands of irrelevant articles to find the good stuff!

This poor level of specificity has a detrimental effect on being able to produce timely systematic reviews. More time is spent identifying studies for inclusion in systematic reviews than on any other critical task in the process.

Surfacing the PICO elements of a study according to a pre-defined framework and using controlled vocabularies could dramatically speed up the study identification process by improving the specificity of searches without compromising on their accuracy.

But none of this is easy and it’s going to take a big collective effort to make it work.

What exactly is the task?

The task looks quite similar to the RCT identification task in Cochrane Crowd, except that for this task you’ll have to try to answer some questions regarding the trial’s key PICO characteristics.

How can I get involved?

Anyone who has screened 100 or more records in the RCT identification task will ‘unlock’ this new task. Once the task is unlocked, you’ll be able to see it in your Crowd dashboard. So if you’ve already screened 100, the PICO task awaits you!

What records are being annotated first by the Crowd?

We’re starting off with records that are focused on a particular healthcare domain: airways. We’re doing this because it will give us a good chance to assess Crowd annotation consistency and to provide a complete dataset in one area, meaning we can test out just how useful these annotations are to identify relevant health research quickly, easily and accurately!

Well, what are you waiting for? Hop over to Cochrane Crowd now and get that PICO task unlocked!

Let’s see if we can we do 500 PICOs in a week!

Sign up to Cochrane Crowd, follow us on Twitter and contact us at crowd@cochrane.org.

Support for Project Transform was provided by Cochrane and the National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia (APP1114605). The contents of the published material are solely the responsibility of the Administering Institution, a Participating Institution or individual authors and do not reflect the views of the NHMRC.

The minutes from the Governing Board’s meeting in Lisbon, 19 March 2018, are now available. Governing Board members are Cochrane’s directors and trustees, and are elected to direct the strategy and policies of the organization. Questions about the minutes can be sent to support@cochrane.org

Additional resources:

• Minutes from Lisbon meeting.
• Governing Board membership.
• Full list of meeting minutes and open access papers.

Cochrane Training is pleased to announce that Cochrane Review production training materials are now available in Russian.

The materials cover essential aspects of a Cochrane Review production based on the Cochrane Handbook for Systematic Reviews of Interventions. The training materials, translated into Russian, consist of records of fourteen Cochrane standard training modules. These modules include subjects and topics required to guide a learner or evidence-user, new to Cochrane, through the steps of a Cochrane intervention Review production; starting from defining a review question to understanding and reporting biases, analysing non-standard data and exploring heterogeneity. 

They will be especially helpful to medical and pharmacy students as well as their teachers by facilitating their way in an increasingly advancing field of health evidence synthesis.

It’s hoped that they will be instrumental in creating learning opportunities for health professionals and practitioners across Russia, contributing largely to Cochrane’s work in knowledge translation within Russian-speaking settings by creating a culture of systematic approach to search for evidence, critical appraisal and evidence synthesis, and ultimately defining research agenda.

These freely available Cochrane training materials will promote Cochrane’s mission of promoting evidence-informed health decision-making by producing high-quality, relevant, accessible systematic reviews and other synthesized research evidence.

Find out more here: Cochrane Training Resources in Russian.

Cochrane Russia would like to thank Cochrane Training colleagues, Cochrane’s Translations Teams, the teaching staff and Masters and PhD students of the Department of Basic and Clinical Pharmacology, and the team at the Kazan Federal University Media Centre “Univer” led by Marina V. Shakirzyanova at the KFU Research and Education Centre for Evidence-Based medicine at Cochrane Russia.