Background: The Australasian Cochrane Centre (ACC) is currently the reference centre for Australia, South East Asia, South Asia, New Zealand and the Pacific. In response to a growing need to have a regional branch, the ACC supported the formation of the South Asian Cochrane Network (SACN) to cater to the training and support needs of people from South Asia.', 'Background: In low and middle income countries resources available for health care are limited, and it is of particular importance that they are used for things that work. With growing awareness of the importance of systematic reviews great efforts have been made to identify all randomised, or potentially randomised, studies. Much of this effort has been co-ordinated through the Cochrane Collaboration, and the Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials (CENTRAL) is acknowledged as the most complete source of randomised trials (RCTs).

Objectives: To document the formation and the goals of the SACN', 'Objectives: To estimate what proportion of trials on CENTRAL were conducted in low and middle income countries and to assess how good a source of such studies CENTRAL is.

Methods: Through 2004, we conducted 11 awareness raising workshops on systematic reviews, meta-analysis and the Cochrane Collaboration and held two protocol development workshops. A website and mailing list was set up. A survey of the contact database identified around 50 review authors and five review group editors. An exploratory meeting was held at Goa in India in December 2004 to formalize the structure and functioning of the SACN. ', "Methods: Countries were grouped as low or middle income using the World Bank classification. All 427807 citations on The Cochrane Library's CENTRAL (Issue 4, 2004) were transferred to ProCite and searched using country names in English, French and Spanish, where relevant, and tropical disease terms. 39,170 citations (9%) were identified. All citations published in 1991, 1995, and 2000 were selected for electronic and manual checking. In addition the bibliographic databases Chinese Medical Journals (China), IndMED (India), KoreaMED (Korea), LILACS (Latin America), Magyar Orvosi Bibliografia (Hungary), Panteleimon (Ukraine) were searched for these 3 years, and checked whether studies identified were in CENTRAL. Databases of Eastern Mediterranean, Arabic and Thai journals have been identified and will also be searched.

Results: Twenty five people from Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, the ACC and the Cochrane Steering Group attended the exploratory meeting and formally established the SACN on December 18, 2004 as a branch of the ACC. The SACN currently comprises eight network sites in India, two in Pakistan and one each in Sri Lanka and Bangladesh with a coordinating center in India. The five goals of the strategic plan of the SACN are to: raise awareness about the Cochrane Collaboration and evidence based practice; train and support contributors to the Cochrane Collaboration; promote access to The Cochrane Library; ensure a sustainable structure for the SACN; and represent and advocate for high quality research in South Asia. We also hope to identify and contribute reports of published and unpublished trials from South Asian health care journals and databases to the Collaboration's central register of controlled trials.", 'Results: Of 7948 citations in 1991, 1995 and 2000, 1008 (13%) were definitely not an RCT, based on manual inspection of the CENTRAL record. 1289 (16%) had no participants from a low or middle income country. In the target years we found 780 citations on the Chinese Medical Journals database that were not in CENTRAL, 301 on LILACS, 97 on KoreaMED, 65 on IndMED, 57 on Panteleimon, and 4 on Magyar Orvosi Bibliografia. Therefore, of the 5848 citations identified to date, 4544 (78%) are on CENTRAL.

Conclusions: Based on these preliminary data, 5% of citations on CENTRAL are of RCTs or possible RCTs from low and middle income countries. CENTRAL is a considerable source of such trials, but is far from comprehensive.