LEADER

Cochrane Reviews

Cochrane Reviews: new blocks on the kids

I Shrier

Lady Davis Institute for Medical Research, Montreal, Canada

Correspondence to:
Correspondence to:
Dr Shrier
Lady Davis Institute for Medical Research, Centre for Clinical Epidemiology, SMBD-Jewish General Hospital, 3755 Cote Sainte-Catherine Road, Montreal H3T 1E2, Canada; Ian.shrier@mcgill.ca

Keywords: Cochrane Review; Critical Review; systematic review

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

The Cochrane Collaboration should be congratulated for its dedication to documenting continuing clinical trials, teaching critical appraisal, and supporting research into new methods of reviewing the literature. However, Cochrane Reviews can be created by untrained people who simply follow an algorithmic approach and are unaware of important methodological issues. Therefore, the objective of this article is to highlight important limitations of Cochrane Reviews, including the Review Manager software¹ that is required,² the inappropriate use of a summary statistic, and finally the restriction to only randomised controlled trial (RCT) data. To illustrate these points, I have used a 1% random sample of Cochrane Reviews—that is, 16 studies numbered 1, 101, 201...1501 of 1596 of the Cochrane Database on 3 April 2003.^3–18

There are important limitations to the software required by the Cochrane Collaboration (Review Manager). Most important is that Review Manager cannot include (a) results based on . . . [Full text of this article]

CiteULike    Complore    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    What's this?

This article has been cited by other articles:

• Shrier, I., Boivin, J.-F., Steele, R. J., Platt, R. W., Furlan, A., Kakuma, R., Brophy, J., Rossignol, M. (2007). Should Meta-Analyses of Interventions Include Observational Studies in Addition to Randomized Controlled Trials? A Critical Examination of Underlying Principles. Am J Epidemiol 166: 1203-1209 [Abstract] [Full Text]