Cochrane Collaboration

About: Cochrane Collaboration is a nonprofit organization based out in Oxford, United Kingdom. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Systematic review & Randomized controlled trial. The organization has 1995 authors who have published 3928 publications receiving 382695 citations.

The Global Burden of Journal Peer Review in the Biomedical Literature: Strong Imbalance in the Collective Enterprise.

Abstract: The growth in scientific production may threaten the capacity for the scientific community to handle the ever-increasing demand for peer review of scientific publications. There is little evidence regarding the sustainability of the peer-review system and how the scientific community copes with the burden it poses. We used mathematical modeling to estimate the overall quantitative annual demand for peer review and the supply in biomedical research. The modeling was informed by empirical data from various sources in the biomedical domain, including all articles indexed at MEDLINE. We found that for 2015, across a range of scenarios, the supply exceeded by 15% to 249% the demand for reviewers and reviews. However, 20% of the researchers performed 69% to 94% of the reviews. Among researchers actually contributing to peer review, 70% dedicated 1% or less of their research work-time to peer review while 5% dedicated 13% or more of it. An estimated 63.4 million hours were devoted to peer review in 2015, among which 18.9 million hours were provided by the top 5% contributing reviewers. Our results support that the system is sustainable in terms of volume but emphasizes a considerable imbalance in the distribution of the peer-review effort across the scientific community. Finally, various individual interactions between authors, editors and reviewers may reduce to some extent the number of reviewers who are available to editors at any point.

Who is blinded in randomized clinical trials? A study of 200 trials and a survey of authors.

Abstract: Background Insufficient blinding of persons involved in randomized clinical trials is associated with bias. The appraisal of the risk of bias is difficult without adequate information in trial reports.Purpose We wanted to study how blinding is reported in clinical trials and how lack of reporting relate to lack of blinding.Methods A cohort study of 200 blinded randomized clinical trials published in 2001 randomly sampled from the Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials, and a questionnaire survey of the trial authors.Results One-hundred and fifty-six (78%) articles described trials as ‘double blind’. In three (2%) of such articles the blinding status of patients, health care providers and data collectors was explicitly described. Eighty-eight (56%) articles did not describe the blinding status of any trial person, and 41 articles (26%) reported no blinding relevant information at all beyond the trial being ‘double blind’. One-hundred and thirty (65%) surveyed authors responded. Patients were blinde...