A very warm welcome to Cape Town! We look forward to welcoming more than 1400 people from at least 67 countries to the first ever Global Evidence Summit.

The Global Evidence Summit will be the first time that Cochrane, The Campbell Collaboration, Guidelines International Network, International Society for Evidence-based Health Care, and Joanna Briggs Institute have joined forces to create this premiere event in evidence-based policy.

The theme of the Summit is ‘Using evidence. Improving lives’ and aims to advance the use of reliable research evidence in addressing some of the world’s most serious health and social challenges. We’ve created an illuminating line-up of content and world-class speakers and facilitators that promises to excite, intrigue and engage wide audiences.

We hope the Summit will provide the fruitful ground for all delegates to meet, share and collaborate to progress our aims. For a full programme schedule visit globalevidencesummit.org/signup.

Enjoy the Summit, and do take some time to explore a little of our beautiful country during your stay with us.

Best wishes,

Jimmy Volmink and Tamara Kredo
Chairs of the Organising Committees for the 2017 Global Evidence Summit

Attend the regional representative’s networking session at GES and meet other organizations in your region

Wednesday 13 September, 1-2pm, Exhibition Halls 1& 2

Sign-up here: https://www.globalevidencesummit.org/meetings/regional-representatives-networking-session

Sign-up to the Cochrane AGM part 1 & 2

Part 1: Community session, Thursday 14 September, 6-7pm, Auditorium 1: https://www.globalevidencesummit.org/meetings/cochrane-annual-general-meeting-part-1-community-session

Part 2: Thursday 14 September, 7-8pm, Auditorium 1: https://www.globalevidencesummit.org/meetings/cochrane-annual-general-meeting-part-2

Download the GES app and create your personalized schedule

Search ‘GESummit 2017’ in iOS and Android app stores.

BE WATER WISE

Cape Town has been experiencing one of the most severe droughts in recent history. The whole province is severely affected and water restrictions are in place. We therefore request all delegates of the GES to keep this in mind and to use water sparingly. When you’re at your hotel, take a quick shower instead of a bath, don’t put towels in the laundry basket unless absolutely necessary, and be careful to close taps properly.

Strategies to reduce antibiotic prescribing for acute respiratory infections in primary care

This Cochrane Overview is the first publication produced with the support of Cochrane’s Fast Track service. This service, which is offered by the Cochrane Editorial Unit, supports expedited production of high-quality, high-impact Cochrane Reviews. For more information, please visit the Fast Track information page.

• Read more about this Cochrane Review and the key findings. 

Cochrane has always envisaged a world where Cochrane Reviews would be updated as soon as new relevant evidence became available. Now, with a new approach to review production and clever application of technology, Cochrane is trialling a way to do just that.

Anneliese Synnot of Project Transform’s living systematic review (LSR) team, in partnership with pilot LSR teams and editorial groups, the Cochrane Editorial Unit and the LSR Network, has been working away for some time on the methods and processes needed for Cochrane to pilot LSRs. We caught up with her on the eve of an exciting milestone for the LSR project.

‘I’m very proud and more than a little bit excited to see the publication of Cochrane’s first living systematic reviews’ says Annie. ‘We now have two review teams, led by Elie Akl and Lara Kahale, at the American University of Beirut, Lebanon (with Cochrane Gynaecological, Neuro-Oncology and Orphan Cancers) and Geoffrey Spurling, at University of Queensland, Australia (with Cochrane Acute Respiratory Infections) who have transitioned their Cochrane Reviews into living mode.’

• Akl EA, Kahale LA, Hakoum MB, Matar CF, Sperati F, Barba M, Yosuico VED, Terrenato I, Synnot A, Schünemann H. Parenteral anticoagulation in ambulatory patients with cancer. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews 2017
• Spurling GKP, Del Mar CB, Dooley L, Foxlee R, Farley R. Delayed antibiotics for respiratory infections. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews 2017

‘A further LSR team, led by Rebecca Hodder and Luke Wolfenden, of University of Newcastle and Hunter New England Population Health in Australia, is working with the Cochrane Heart Group. They are also very close to transitioning their Cochrane review, Interventions for increasing fruit and vegetable consumption in children aged 5 years and under, into living mode. You can expect to see this published on the Cochrane Library very soon. All in all, we hope to have 3 LSRs published by the end of the year, with additional LSRs being prepared by the Cochrane Musculoskeletal Group.’

‘I’d like to extend a big thanks to the ever-growing community of systematic review, guideline and publication experts who have worked hard over the past year to achieve this exciting milestone for Cochrane’, Annie says. ‘I’d particularly like to acknowledge the contribution of Elie Akl, Lara Kahale and Gail Quinn, who have been working with us on the LSR methods and processes for over 12 months prior to transitioning their review’.

So what does this mean in practical terms? The above review teams have published a conventional update of an existing Cochrane Review on the Cochrane Library that will be now be maintained in living mode. They’ve outlined their plans for how they will do this in the methods section of the update. The teams will now be undertaking monthly searches to identify any new evidence relevant to their review, and communicating this to readers on the Cochrane Library.

Project Transform’s LSR team will be involved in a number of activities at the upcoming Global Evidence Summit, so if you are going to be in Cape Town, make sure you have the LSR events on your schedule! You can also find more information about the LSR work here, or email us at lsr@cochrane.org with your comments, questions, and feedback.

Support for the Cochrane Review 'Interventions for increasing fruit and vegetable consumption in children aged five years and under' was provided by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect the views of the Foundation.

Support for Project Transform is 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 Tobacco Addiction Group at the University of Oxford in the UK is one of the oldest groups working on Cochrane Reviews. It has produced dozens of these during the last two decades and, in 2016, it embarked on a project to identify the top priorities for future research into tobacco control. 

The Cochrane Tobacco Addiction Group's research prioritization exercise involved more than 300 people and identified a total of 183 unanswered questions in tobacco control through two online surveys and an Oxford-based workshop. It identified 24 priority questions, grouped into eight priority themes. This new set of research priorities to support tobacco control will help ensure future research provides the greatest benefit to public health and value for money.

Read more about this excellent example of priority setting on Cochrane.org

Sept 13 - Voting is closing in 24 hours. Please vote electronically until 19:30 GMT+2, even if you will be attending the AGM in-person. Vote here:  http://agm.cochrane.org/vote 

Dear Cochrane Member,

It is our pleasure to invite you to attend Cochrane’s 2017 Annual General Meeting.

The aim of the Annual General Meeting is to provide the opportunity for Cochrane’s trustees (the Governing Board) and senior officers to explain their management of the charity to you, the members. It also provides you with an opportunity to ask questions before voting on business decisions and current issues, which are put to the vote as ‘resolutions’.

This year, the formal business agenda will be preceded by a celebration and assessment of success by the Cochrane Community, and facilitated by Charles Wiysonge from Cochrane South Africa. We hope it will be of interest to all Cochrane members and supporters. The AGM will be recorded and made available on the Cochrane Community website for those unable to attend in person.

Voting on AGM resolutions:

This is the first AGM to be held under Cochrane’s new Articles of Association and now, for the first time, every member has a vote!

All contributors who have been designated as members of Cochrane have been emailed to advise of their status. In order to vote as a member, you must be able to log in using an active Cochrane account username and password. To log in to an existing Cochrane account or set up a new one, please go to https://account.cochrane.org and follow the directions provided. If you have questions about your membership status, please contact membership@cochrane.org.

Vote now

All members are entitled to vote on AGM resolutions, and all votes will be conducted online. You can vote either before the meeting, or during the meeting after hearing any discussion, if you have an internet connected device with you. You are entitled to vote even if you are not attending the meeting.

To access the full AGM agenda and papers, find out more about the decisions requiring your vote and how to vote, please visit agm.cochrane.org.
 

Sign-up:

It helps to let us know if you are planning to join us in person. Sign up to the meeting at agm.cochrane.org. By attending the meeting, you consent to being filmed and/or photographed for Cochrane communications purposes such as our website or annual review.

To get in touch about the AGM, please contact admin@cochrane.org.

Thank you for your continued support, which is so important to us. We look forward to seeing many of you in Cape Town.

With best wishes,

Cindy Farquhar
Governing Board Co-Chair and Chair of the 2017 AGM

Sarah Watson
Company Secretary and Head of Finance & Core Services

On behalf of the Governing Board

It is with deep sadness that we announce to the Cochrane community that Dr. Fredric Wolf PhD died on July 23, 2017 at the age of 71. Fred had been battling two cancers for over a decade. He was a close friend and respected colleague to many of us, and we deeply mourn his loss.

As an academician, Fred had a long and illustrious history in both medical education and biomedical informatics. His highly cited meta-analysis work had an immeasurable impact on physician practices and patient outcomes. Fred was a creative, versatile, non-linear thinker and these traits are reflected in the path of his career.

After 6 years in the Peace Corps in Costa Rica he returned to the US with a goal of getting an MS in education and then return to Costa Rica as a teacher. Instead he discovered a passion for medical education and quantitative research that led to lifelong interests in meta-analysis, evidence-based medicine, clinical reasoning, and decision-making. Later in his career he became an important academic leader and program builder.

In 1980, Fred graduated from Kent State with his PhD and began his academic career at Ohio State University. In 1982, he moved to the University of Michigan where he directed the instructional computing facility at the medical school and later created the Laboratory for Computing, Cognition, and Clinical Skills. His pioneering psychometric work on the validity of patient management problems as a clinical reasoning assessment technique laid the groundwork for the use of “efficiency” measures rather than “proficiency” measures as the basis for scoring performance.

Fred’s 1986 monograph on meta-analysis is widely cited and widely used as an introductory text. He undertook a sabbatical at the UK Cochrane Centre in 1995. Sir Iain Chalmers, the Founding Director of the UKCC, noted that ‘Fred was a greatly appreciated and relatively rare US supporter of The Cochrane Collaboration in its early days'. Following his sabbatical he became an active participant in The Cochrane Collaboration. Several of his meta-analyses and Cochrane systematic reviews are highly cited, including reviews documenting that continuing education programs that include interactive, hands-on training are more likely to change physician practice, and that asthma self-management education and training program have positive effects on children’s and adolescent’s quality of life.

Fred’s 1985 JAMA article on heuristics and biases in clinical reasoning is cited in Jerome Groopman’s best-selling book on How Doctors Think as one of two articles to read “for those interested in the Bayesian approach” to decision making. Teaming up with Chuck Friedman and Arthur Elstein, Fred was a key partner in the “Three Amigos” studies of diagnostic proficiency and computer-based clinical decision support, which resulted in several important publications in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, JAMA, and the Journal of General Internal Medicine.

In 1997, Fred moved from Michigan to the University of Washington, as chair of the Department of Medical Education and Biomedical Informatics. In Seattle, Fred played a critical role in fostering academic Biomedical and Health Informatics at the University of Washington, guiding the department to become a nationally prominent center for research and training. After 13 years as Department Chair, Fred stepped down in 2012 to focus on his own research and teaching which included two very popular courses on evidence based medicine, systematic reviews and meta-analysis. “The foundation [Wolf] laid during his 20 years at UW allowed both biomedical informatics and medical education at UW to grow to their full potential,” said Peter Tarczy-Hornoch, current Chair of the Department of Medical Education and Biomedical Informatics. Fred’s work extended beyond his home department; he was recognized with adjunct professorships in the Departments of Epidemiology, Health Services, and Pharmacy.

Fred brought to his battle with cancer the same energy and tenacity he brought to his academic work. Through an autologous bone marrow transplant and later an unrelated donor transplant, he successfully fought cancer for over a decade—all the while being a wonderful husband to his wife Leora and parent to his three children.

As a scholar, leader, mentor, battler, husband, and parent, Fred was and will ever remain an inspiration for all of us.

Sincerely,

Beth Devine and Jeremy Grimshaw

Members, SRSM

Some of Dr. Fred Wolf’s Notable Publications

Agapova M, Devine EB, Nguyen H, Wolf FM, Inoue LY. Using indirect comparisons to compare interventions within a Cochrane review: a tool for comparative effectiveness research. J Comp Eff Res. 2014 Jul;3(4):345-357.
PMID: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25275232
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.2217/cer.14.29

Wolf F, Hobby R, Lowry S, Bauman A, Franza BR, Lin B, et al. Education and data-intensive science in the beginning of the 21st century. OMICS 2011 Apr;15(4):217-219.

PMID: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21476844
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1089/omi.2011.0009

Emerson GB, Warme WJ, Wolf FM, Heckman JD, Brand RA, Leopold SS. Testing for the presence of positive-outcome bias in peer review: a randomized controlled trial. Arch Intern Med. 2010 Nov 22;170(21):1934-1939.
PMID: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21098355
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1001/archinternmed.2010.406

Deshazo JP, Lavallie DL, Wolf FM. Publication trends in the medical informatics literature: 20 years of "Medical Informatics" in MeSH. BMC Med Inform Decis Mak. 2009 Jan 21;9:7-6947-9-7.
PMID: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19159472
Free Full Text: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2652453/pdf/1472-6947-9-7.pdf
DOI: http://dx.doi.org./10.1186/1472-6947-9-7.

Cunningham MR, Warme WJ, Schaad DC, Wolf FM, Leopold SS. Industry-funded positive studies not associated with better design or larger size. Clin Orthop Relat Res. 2007 Apr;457:235-241.
PMID: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17195818
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1097/BLO.0b013e3180312057

Lynch JR, Cunningham MRA, Warme WJ, Schaad DC, Wolf FM, Leopold SS. Commercially funded and United States-based research is more likely to be published; good-quality studies with negative outcomes are not. J Bone Joint Surg Am. 2007 May;89(5):1010-1018.

PMID: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17473138
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.2106/JBJS.F.01152.

Friedman CP, Gatti GG, Franz TM, Murphy GC, Wolf FM, Heckerling PS, et al. Do physicians know when their diagnoses are correct? Implications for decision support and error reduction. J Gen Intern Med. 2005 Apr;20(4):334-339.

PMID: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15857490
Free Full Text: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1490097/
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1525-1497.2005.30145.x

Guevara JP, Berlin JA, Wolf FM. Meta-analytic methods for pooling rates when follow-up duration varies: a case study. BMC Med Res Methodol. 2004 Jul 12;4:17.

PMID: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15248899
Free Full Text: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC481068/pdf/1471-2288-4-17.pdf
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1471-2288-4-17.

Wolf FM. Methodological quality, evidence, and Research in Medical Education (RIME); Acad Med. 2004;79(10):S68-9.
PMID: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15383394

Wolf FM, Shea JA, Albanese MA. Toward setting a research agenda for systematic reviews of evidence of the effects of medical education. Teach Learn Med. 2001 Winter;13(1):54-60.

PMID: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11273381

Wolf FM. Lessons to be learned from evidence-based medicine: Practice and promise of evidence-based medicine and evidence-based education; Med Teach. 2000;22(3):251-259.

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01421590050006214

Davis D, O'Brien MA, Freemantle N, Wolf FM, Mazmanian P, Taylor-Vaisey A. Impact of formal continuing medical education: do conferences, workshops, rounds, and other traditional continuing education activities change physician behavior or health care outcomes? JAMA 1999 Sep 1;282(9):867-874.
PMID: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10478694
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1001/jama.282.9.867.

Friedman CP, Elstein AS, Wolf FM, Murphy GC, Franz TM, Heckerling PS, et al. Enhancement of clinicians' diagnostic reasoning by computer-based consultation: a multisite study of 2 systems. JAMA 1999 Nov 17;282(19):1851-1856.

PMID: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10573277
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1001/jama.282.19.1851

Wolf FM, Miller JG, Gruppen LD, Ensminger WD. Teaching skills for accessing and interpreting information from systematic reviews/meta-analyses, practice guidelines, and the Internet; Proc AMIA Annu Fall Symp. 1997 1997 October 25-29:662-666.

PMID: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9357708
Free Full Text: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2233330/pdf/procamiaafs00001-0696.pdf

Wolf FM. Methodological observations on bias. In: Wachter KW, Straf ML, editors. The future of meta-analysis New York, NY: Russell Sage; 1990. p. 139-151.

Wolf FM. Meta-analysis quantitative methods for research synthesis. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications; 1986.

Wolf FM, Gruppen LD, Billi JE. Differential diagnosis and the competing-hypotheses heuristic. A practical approach to judgment under uncertainty and Bayesian probability. JAMA 1985 May 17;253(19):2858-2862.

PMID: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3989960
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1001/jama.1985.03350430070028

The agenda and open access papers for the Cochrane Governing Board meeting to be held in Cape Town at the Global Evidence Summit are now available. Cochrane's governing body is the Board, comprising 13 members of whom some are elected by Cochrane’s contributors and some are external members appointed by the Board. The Board is responsible for overseeing the development and implementation of Cochrane’s strategic direction. If you would like to comment on an item then you should contact your  Board representative. Contact details for Board members are available on the Board membership page.

Cochrane Community members may be particularly  interested in the following papers:

• KT Implementation Plan
• The Structure and Function of Cochrane Review Groups: Implementation of Networks and Editorial Board
• A Content Strategy for Cochrane - the future Systematic Review

Cochrane Crowd needs your help to identify randomised controlled trials (RCT) from  ClinicalTrials.gov! Today Cochrane Crowd in partnership with Cochrane’s Centralised Search Service launches a new identification task, called ClinicalTrials.Gov identification (or CT ID for short).

Don’t know what Cochrane Crowd is? It’s Cochrane’s citizen science platform. Anyone can join Cochrane Crowd’s collaborative volunteer effort to help categorise and summarise healthcare evidence so that we can make better healthcare decisions. Take a look at a 2-minute introductory video here.

Read on for the low-down on the new task from Anna Noel-Storr, Co-Lead of Cochrane Crowd.

What is this new task all about?

Cochrane Crowd’s main task is the randomised trial (RCT) identification task, where the Crowd identifies reports of RCTs or quasi-RCTs from centralised searches, for uploading to the Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials (CENTRAL). In doing this we are helping reviewers and researchers from around the world find the evidence they need. Until now, our amazing community has been working on records identified from bibliographic databases, such as Embase and PubMed. For this new task, the records are from clinicaltrials.gov, the largest registry of publicly and privately supported clinical studies of human participants conducted around the world.

Why is this task important?

The ClinicalTrials.gov registry contains studies that may not appear elsewhere. All clinical trials should be registered prospectively in a registry such as ClinicalTrials.gov, and all should make their results available and accessible once the trial is completed. The vast majority of trials so far identified by Cochrane Crowd are trials that have been written up in a publication. By identifying trials registered in ClinicalTrials.gov we will now also routinely identify: planned, ongoing and completed yet unpublished trials. Around a half of trials registered on ClinicalTrials.gov are RCTs. That’s a lot of trials! By running them through the Crowd (and the machine – more on that in a moment) and depositing them in CENTRAL, we hope that the Cochrane reviewers and others will ultimately be able to easily discover planned, in progress, unpublished and published RCTs from one place.

What will the process be?

Each month, all new trials that have been registered on ClinicalTrials.gov will be first run through a machine classifier that we have built. This classifier has been built based on a gold standard data set developed by the Crowd and the Centralised Search Service teams. When a record is run through the classifier it receives a score out of 100 representing the likelihood that the record is describing an RCT. For example, if a record gets a score of 99, then the machine is 99% sure that the record is describing an RCT. We’ve been working hard to determine appropriate cut points where we can be confident that the machine has got it right. After all, we don’t want to use up valuable human effort if the machine is reliable. We’ve been able to establish two cut points: one at the lower end of the spectrum and one at the upper end. The records at either end will go directly into the ‘bin’ or to CENTRAL respectively. The records that fall between these two points will go to Cochrane Crowd.

What do I need to do that is different from the usual RCT ID task?

The task is exactly the same in that you are classifying records as being RCTs, or not. But the records look a little different. To help you get used to the new format, we’ve set up a training module with 20 practice records that you’ll need to do before you start screening live records. It’s worth also just saying that with the ClinicalTrials.gov task there is a higher prevalence of RCTs so if you enjoy that moment of finding an RCT (and let’s face it, who doesn’t?), then you might find this task even more enjoyable than the standard task. We also think it’s a great one for beginners as the records are structured nicely.

How many records are there?

There are around 100,000 records currently ‘in the pot’. Once we are through the backlog, we anticipate that there will be around 2000 per month. We’re aiming to have the backlog cleared by the end of the year. I feel a “challenge” coming on!

How long will this task be posted for?

For quite a while. The more human generated data we can amass, the more training data we’ll have to feed into the machine - so one day it might be as smart as the Crowd! But for now this is a task for people and it will be on the platform for the foreseeable future.

When can I start?

Right now! Go and make a nice cup of tea, log in as usual and you will see the CT.Gov identification task at the top of your screen.

Can I still work on the usual RCT identification task?

Yes you can keep working on that task as usual. You could alternate between the two. Or you could just concentrate on the CT ID task. It’s entirely up to you.

Twitter chat

If you’re a twitterer, we’ll be using #CrowdCTID.

Who can I contact if I have any questions or queries?

You can either contact me, Anna, (anna.noel-storr@rdm.ox.ac.uk) or my brilliant colleague, Emily (crowd@cochrane.org) and we’ll try and get back to you as quickly as possible.

The Covidence platform continues to evolve, with recent product updates advancing the tool towards the vision of a world where answers to questions about health and other fields of human wellbeing are accurate, up to date and accessible. The Covidence team is committed to engaging with the Cochrane community and continuing to make improvements that are user-focused. Significant improvements have been made recently to data extraction and to importing.

Covidence is an online systematic review production platform and the recommended tool for Cochrane systematic reviews. The application streamlines the most labour-intensive parts of a review, including title/abstract screening, full text review, Risk of Bias assessments, data extraction. Registered Cochrane reviews are free in Covidence, and recently this was extended to Cochrane Centre-associated reviews as well.

Covidence at Global Evidence Summit

The Covidence team will have be at stand 13A at the Global Evidence Summit in Cape Town. Please say hello and let us know how your research is going! In addition, two workshops will be held: Introduction to Covidence, and Covidence Forum. Introduction to Covidence is a complete walk-through of the tool designed for novice users. Covidence Forum is intended for individuals already familiar with Covidence, and will share more in-depth tips and have additional time for discussion and feedback.

Recent updates

Additional customisation during data extraction

Covidence has a streamlined data extraction form with many of the standard elements pre-programmed, minimising time research teams have to spend on constructing their forms. You can see a walkthrough of creating a data extraction form in Covidence here.

You’ll see that there have been several recent additions to make the form even more flexible. You can now create custom effect measures, in which the data type collected in the table can be an integer, a decimal, a percentage, or even free text for qualitative outcomes. Furthermore, these data types are now validated, so the system will flag for users when a data point differs from the indicated type. Custom text fields can also be added to several sections of the form, so if there’s information you’d like to capture that isn’t covered in the standard form, you can create a place for it.

Improved Imports

You can now view your import history directly from your review dashboard. In addition, in response to feedback that the de-duplication process was unclear, it is now displayed more explicitly in this improved review history on the dashboard. Finally, the structure of the importer has been significantly improved leading to faster and more stable imports!

What’s coming next

Upcoming work will focus on building relationships directly with each Cochrane Review Group to lay foundations for further integration between Archie / Cochrane and Covidence. Our intention is that in the future, reviews will be automatically created under the Cochrane Review Group in Covidence as soon as they are registered, making it seamless for teams to begin work as soon as they’d like. Each review will be associated with a specific group account in Covidence, which will also enable editorial team members to easily see an overview of how everyone is going. Your Covidence homepage will look similar to the accompanying image, with reviews collated by review group for easy organisation.

Have some ideas on how to continue improving Covidence?

Thank you for voicing your feedback and user needs, these are an invaluable input into our product roadmap and prioritisation process. The Covidence team would love to hear more from you! Please contact Covidence Support at support@covidence.org if you’d like to share some ideas, have a chat, or just say hello!

We also welcome feedback via this form.

Some resources you might find helpful:

• YouTube
• Covidence Knowledge Base: English and Spanish
• Webinars for Cochrane authors: more details at Cochrane Training

Cochrane’s organizational Dashboard presents our achievements in key metrics, and our Target Report looks at how we are meeting our Strategy to 2020 targets.
 
We use these as an excellent tool to reflect on our accomplishments on a quarterly basis.
 
Here are just a few highlights from Q2 2017 Dashboard:

• Global usage of Cochrane.org continues its quarter-by-quarter growth; now exceeding 3.5m sessions in the quarter.
• 62% of Cochrane.org usage is viewing non-English content. Usage is soaring in South America. Mexico has become the top user of Cochrane.org, replacing USA for the first time and exceeding half a million sessions in a quarter for the first time.
• Sales and royalties year to date are excellent. Royalties year to date are up 24.5% compared with the same period last year.
• Cochrane Impact Factor revised up to 6.264 (tbc). 

Here are some highlights from the Q2 2017 Target Report:

• Membership scheme phase 1 is now live. Formal launch to follow at Global Evidence Summit.
• Global Evidence Summit registrations exceed more than 1,000 by the closing of the early bird registration deadline.
• Enhanced Cochrane Library will have a soft launch in September with the intention of a full launch by end of Q4.

For more information: 

• Cochrane’s Q2 2017 Dashboard
• Cochrane's Q2 2017 Target Report
• Cochrane's Strategy to 2020