Objectives: This workshop will consider the language used in Cochrane Systematic Reviews (CSRs), consumer summaries and other medical texts to describe the evidence supporting the conclusions drawn and/or recommendations made. An approach to communicating such evidence clearly, consistently and free from accidental bias, will be discussed and applied to examples from CSRs and other medical texts.

Description: The rigour of systematic review and analysis of evidence for a clinical question can easily be lost if the language used to describe and summarise the results is open to misinterpretation. Review of CSR abstracts, clinical practice guidelines and other medical texts shows that summary statements are often open to misinterpretation. In particular, summary statements describing evidence of benefit, evidence of harm, inconclusive evidence, insufficient evidence and evidence of no significant effect are often confusing, even for experienced readers of such texts. This is further compounded by the use of biased expressions, such as "no evidence to support a beneficial effect" when there have been no studies of the effect in question.
Participants will be invited to interpret examples of summary statements from Cochrane reviews and other texts in the absence of more detailed study information and note the pitfalls and biases inherent in the language used. A strategy for how to avoid such problems will be presented with supporting exercises.

Target audience: Writers of systematic reviews, clinical practice guidelines, consumer summaries or other medical texts.

Style: Training workshop