The Cochrane Collaboration

• Cochrane Collaboration
• Evidence-based medicine
• Health services research

“Twenty years ago, you could read all the literature in your field,” said reference librarian Kathy Robbins, PhD, MLIS, scanning shelf after shelf of medical journals at the University of Minnesota Bio-Medical Library in Minneapolis. “Now, 6000 journal articles are published each day.”

Merely keeping up with this torrent of information in one's own specialty is difficult enough. Synthesizing and applying the knowledge to patient care verges on the impossible without some sort of guidance. Fortunately, this guidance is available.

Bringing the fruits of new research to the bedside takes at least four levels of review, said Brian Haynes, MD, PhD, professor and chair of the department of clinical epidemiology at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. Publications such as ACP Journal Club (of which Haynes is the editor) collect relevant trials; the Cochrane Collaboration synthesizes studies of a given research question; Evidence-Based Medicine Reviews integrates the material; and Clinical Evidence from the British Medical Journal organizes the information according to clinical topic areas, bringing the material closer to practitioners. The goal of the Cochrane Collaboration is to improve the quality of decisions in health care by “preparing, maintaining, and promoting the accessibility of systematic reviews of the effects of health care interventions.” The Cochrane Collaboration has consistently used randomized, controlled trials (RCTs) as the principal focus of its reviews.

For medical research, “The Cochrane Collaboration is a good place to start,” said Robbins. “If the answer is there, you save time, because the Collaboration has already done the work of searching journals.”