Cochrane Library
The Cochrane Library is a collection of databases in medicine and other healthcare specialties provided by Cochrane and other organizations. At its core is the collection of Cochrane Reviews, a database of systematic reviews and meta-analyses that summarize and interpret the results of medical research. The Cochrane Library aims to make the results of well-conducted clinical trials readily available and is a key resource in evidence-based medicine.
Access and use
The Cochrane Library is a subscription-based database, published initially 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". There are also arrangements for free access in much of Latin America and in "low-income countries", typically via HINARI. All countries have free access to two-page abstracts of all Cochrane Reviews and short plain-language summaries of selected articles.Cochrane Reviews appear to be relatively underused in the United States for two reasons:
1) Public access to the Cochrane Library in the United States is limited.
2) The government-funded U.S. National Library of Medicine maintains an alternative database MEDLINE, which is free of charge to everyone and has significantly more extensive coverage than Cochrane.
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.
Contents
The Cochrane Library consists of the following databases after significant changes in 2018:- The Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews. Contains all the peer-reviewed systematic reviews and protocols prepared by the Cochrane Review Groups.
- The Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials. CENTRAL is a database that contains details of articles of controlled trials and other studies of healthcare interventions from bibliographic databases, and other published and unpublished sources that are difficult to access, including trials from the trial registries such as International Clinical Trials Registry Platform and ClinicalTrials.gov. However, systematic reviewers need to search not only CENTRAL but also ICTRP and ClinicalTrials.gov to identify unpublished studies.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 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/PubMed, EMBASE, PsycINFO, CINAHL, etc.; a continually updated database of trials called the Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials ; 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 to compare the data of the trials. This creates a review of studies, or systematic review, 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.