Reviews Committee

The reviews committee aims to systematically identify all the published Cochrane Reviews, relevant for the field of rehabilitation.

The first half of this year was spent establishing a process for the screening and tagging. There were a number of challenges associated with this. One challenge has been around simply classifying what might ‘count’ as a rehabilitation-relevant review. We also wanted to establish a process that would be easy for others to contribute to on a formal or informal basis, and we wanted to encourage inter-professional involvement in review identification and tagging.

By June, the Reviews Committee had established and was testing an online database for crowd- sourcing the screening and tagging of reviews. The process involves screening of all Cochrane publications by at least two people from different professional background. We tested this process on all reviews published or updated between January and May 2017, and identified the first 76 relevant reviews, which we categorised broadly in terms of health condition and related professional groups. This are now available on our website (/evidence). We have now added all Cochrane reviews published back to the organisation’s inception to the online review tagging database, and have recruited people from 16 countries to help with the tagging work.

In 2018, the Reviews Committee will progress with our screening and tagging work, plus begin work on the challenging task of coming up with some way of meaningfully grouping the intervention that are the subject of these reviews. The Reviews Committee will aim to inform other Cochrane projects such as the PICO annotation project as well as other Cochrane Rehabilitation initiatives, such as feeding into an e-book on evidence-base rehabilitation.