Background: The Cochrane Style Guide contains the house style for all authors and editors involved in copy editing Cochrane reviews and other Cochrane Collaboration documents. Since the first version in December 2002, there has been no survey of the extent to which published reviews follow the house style. Discussions between the Cochrane Style Guide Working Group (CSGWG), which is responsible for updating the Cochrane Style Guide, and Copy Edit Support, Wiley's copy-editing service that uses the Cochrane Style Guide, have concluded that such a survey is timely.

Objectives: To survey Cochrane reviews published in Issue 2, 2005 of The Cochrane Library for consistency with key aspects of the Cochrane Style Guide.

Methods: Through consensus, HG MacLehose, L Mellor, and T Remmington will select key elements of the Cochrane Style Guide guidance that can be evaluated objectively. Members of the CSGWG and Copy Edit Support will survey Cochrane reviews on Issue 2, 2005 of The Cochrane Library for these key elements. Each person will use a pre-piloted Microsoft Excel form to score the Wiley InterScience PDF versions of each review. We will use the electronic searching option available in Adobe Acrobat 7.0 for the evaluation. We will also visually scan some sections, such as reference lists, where it is not possible to do an electronic search and scan.

Results: In the first Collaboration-wide survey of its kind, we will present data on the extent to which new Cochrane reviews have been copy edited in relation to Cochrane Style Guide guidance.

Conclusions and recommendations: These will provide an indication of how widely the people within the Collaboration are using the Cochrane Style Guide for copy editing Cochrane reviews. This will help inform future Cochrane Style Guide publicity and implementation activities as well as quality improvement initiatives.