The Cochrane Library (named after

Archie Cochrane Archibald Leman Cochrane (12 January 1909 – 18 June 1988) was a Scottish doctor noted for his book ''Effectiveness and Efficiency: Random Reflections on Health Services''. This book advocated the use of randomized control trials to make med ...

) is a collection of

database In computing, a database is an organized collection of data stored and accessed electronically. Small databases can be stored on a file system, while large databases are hosted on computer clusters or cloud storage. The design of databases sp ...

s in medicine and other

healthcare Health care or healthcare is the improvement of health via the prevention, diagnosis, treatment, amelioration or cure of disease, illness, injury, and other physical and mental impairments in people. Health care is delivered by health profe ...

specialties provided by Cochrane and other organizations. At its core is the collection of Cochrane Reviews, a database of

systematic review A systematic review is a Literature review, scholarly synthesis of the evidence on a clearly presented topic using critical methods to identify, define and assess research on the topic. A systematic review extracts and interprets data from publ ...

s and

meta-analyses A meta-analysis is a statistical analysis that combines the results of multiple scientific studies. Meta-analyses can be performed when there are multiple scientific studies addressing the same question, with each individual study reporting me ...

which summarize and interpret the results of medical research. The Cochrane Library aims to make the results of well-conducted

controlled trials Clinical trials are prospective biomedical or behavioral research studies on human participants designed to answer specific questions about biomedical or behavioral interventions, including new treatments (such as novel vaccines, drugs, dieta ...

readily available and is a key resource in

evidence-based medicine Evidence-based medicine (EBM) is "the conscientious, explicit and judicious use of current best evidence in making decisions about the care of individual patients". The aim of EBM is to integrate the experience of the clinician, the values of t ...

Access and use

The Cochrane Library is a subscription-based database, originally published by Update Software and now published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. as part of Wiley Online Library. In many countries, including parts of Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, the Scandinavian countries, New Zealand, Australia, India, South Africa, and Poland, it has been made available free to all residents by "national provision" (typically a government or Department of Health pays for the license). There are also arrangements for free access in much of Latin America and in "low-income countries", typically via

HINARI Hinari Access to Research for Health Programme was set up by the World Health Organization and major publishers to enable developing countries to access collections of biomedical and health literature. There are up to 15,000 e-journals and up to ...

. All countries have free access to two-page abstracts of all Cochrane Reviews and to short plain-language summaries of selected articles. Cochrane Reviews appear to be relatively underused in the United States, presumably because public access is limited (the state of

Wyoming Wyoming () is a U.S. state, state in the Mountain states, Mountain West subregion of the Western United States. It is bordered by Montana to the north and northwest, South Dakota and Nebraska to the east, Idaho to the west, Utah to the south ...

is an exception, having paid for a licence to enable free access to Cochrane Reviews for all residents of Wyoming). From 26 March to 26 May 2020, the Cochrane Library provided temporary unrestricted access to everyone in every country in response to the

COVID-19 pandemic The COVID-19 pandemic, also known as the coronavirus pandemic, is an ongoing global pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The novel virus was first identif ...

The Cochrane Library consists of the following databases after significant changes in 2018: * The Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews (Cochrane Reviews). Contains all the peer-reviewed systematic reviews and protocols (Cochrane Protocols) prepared by the Cochrane Review Groups. * The Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials (CENTRAL). CENTRAL is a database that contains details of articles of Controlled trials and other studies of healthcare interventions from bibliographic databases (majorly MEDLINE and EMBASE), and other published and unpublished sources that are difficult to access, including trials from the trial registries such as

International Clinical Trials Registry Platform The International Clinical Trials Registry Platform (ICTRP) is a platform for the registration of clinical trials operated by the World Health Organization. The ICTRP combines data from multiple cooperating clinical trials registries to generate a ...

(ICTRP) and

ClinicalTrials.gov ClinicalTrials.gov is a registry of clinical trials. It is run by the United States National Library of Medicine (NLM) at the National Institutes of Health, and is the largest clinical trials database, holding registrations from over 329,000 tri ...

. However, systematic reviewers need to search not only CENTRAL but also ICTRP and

to identify unpublished studies. * Cochrane Clinical Answers. These evidence summaries on a variety of questions of interest to healthcare professionals have a user-friendly presentation with graphics and high-level conclusions of the research evidence based on Cochrane Reviews. The Cochrane Library now also features results from Special Collections and Editorials as well as an option to link out to other reviews compiled b
Epistemonikos
Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, Cochrane Protocols and CENTRAL are produced by Cochrane.

''The Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews''

The Cochrane reviews take the format of full-length methodological studies. Cochrane researchers will perform searches of medical and health databases including

MEDLINE MEDLINE (Medical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System Online, or MEDLARS Online) is a bibliographic database of life sciences and biomedical information. It includes bibliographic information for articles from academic journals covering medic ...

PubMed PubMed is a free search engine accessing primarily the MEDLINE database of references and abstracts on life sciences and biomedical topics. The United States National Library of Medicine (NLM) at the National Institutes of Health maintain the ...

, EMBASE,

PsycINFO PsycINFO is a database of abstracts of literature in the field of psychology. It is produced by the American Psychological Association and distributed on the association's APA PsycNET and through third-party vendors. It is the electronic versio ...

CINAHL CINAHL (Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature) is an index of English-language and selected other-language journal articles about nursing, allied health, biomedicine and healthcare. Ella Crandall, Mildred Grandbois, and Mollie ...

, etc.; a continually updated database of trials called the Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials (CENTRAL); hand searching, where researchers look through entire libraries of scientific journals by hand and; reference checking of obtained articles in order to identify additional studies that are relevant to the question they are attempting to answer. The quality of each study is carefully assessed using predefined criteria and evidence of weak methodology or the possibility that a study may have been affected by bias is reported in the review. Cochrane researchers then apply

statistical analysis Statistical inference is the process of using data analysis to infer properties of an underlying distribution of probability.Upton, G., Cook, I. (2008) ''Oxford Dictionary of Statistics'', OUP. . Inferential statistical analysis infers propertie ...

to compare the data of the trials. This creates a review of studies, or

, giving a comprehensive view of the efficacy of a particular medical intervention. Finished reviews are available as a full report with diagrams, in condensed form or as a plain language summary, in order to provide for every reader of the review.

Abstracting and indexing

According to ''

Journal Citation Reports ''Journal Citation Reports'' (''JCR'') is an annual publicationby Clarivate Analytics (previously the intellectual property of Thomson Reuters). It has been integrated with the Web of Science and is accessed from the Web of Science-Core Collect ...

'', ''The Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews'' has a 2016

impact factor The impact factor (IF) or journal impact factor (JIF) of an academic journal is a scientometric index calculated by Clarivate that reflects the yearly mean number of citations of articles published in the last two years in a given journal, as i ...

of 6.264, ranking 14th out of 154 in the category "Medicine, General & Internal category". Reviews are

abstracted and indexed An abstracting service is a service that provides abstracts of publications, often on a subject or group of related subjects, usually on a subscription basis. An indexing service is a service that assigns descriptors and other kinds of access poin ...

in the following

bibliographic databases A bibliographic database is a database of bibliographic records, an organized digital collection of references to published literature, including journal and newspaper articles, conference proceedings, reports, government and legal publications, ...

Science Citation Index Expanded The Science Citation Index Expanded – previously entitled Science Citation Index – is a citation index originally produced by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) and created by Eugene Garfield. It was officially launched in 1964 and ...

Scopus Scopus is Elsevier's abstract and citation database launched in 2004. Scopus covers nearly 36,377 titles (22,794 active titles and 13,583 inactive titles) from approximately 11,678 publishers, of which 34,346 are peer-reviewed journals in top-l ...

, EMBASE,

Academic comments

The Cochrane Library Feedback tool allows users to provide comments on and feedback of Cochrane Reviews and Protocols in The Cochrane Library. If accepted, the feedback will be published in a scrolling list of comments in reverse chronological order, with the most recent submission at the top of the page. The Collaboration has a procedure for the event of serious error, an event which has only occurred once in its history.

Supplements

Annual colloquia have been conducted by Cochrane since 1993. From 1994 onwards, Cochrane has maintained a database of posters and presentations of past colloquia. From 2009 onwards, Cochrane published the abstracts of those colloquia as supplements to the ''Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews''. From 2010 to 2016, an annual newsletter related to Cochrane methodology called ''Cochrane Methods'' (), was published as an annual supplement.

References

{{reflist

External links

The Cochrane Library
on Wiley Online
Abstracts and summaries of Cochrane Reviews
free access
The Centre for Reviews and Dissemination
Systematic review Health informatics Bibliographic databases and indexes Discipline-oriented digital libraries Full-text scholarly online databases British digital libraries Medical databases in the United Kingdom it:Cochrane Library