Background:

Many members of the Iberoamerican Cochrane Network have reported facing difficulties when trying to register review titles with Cochrane Review Groups (CRGs). However, this situation has never been studied yet.

Objectives:

To describe the prevalence and the pattern of difficulties in registering Cochrane titles, from a sample of Iberoamerican authors. To explore possible solutions to overcome them.

Methods:

All the Co-ordinators of the Iberoamerican Branches were surveyed about: proportion and reasons of title rejections; frequency of satisfactory CRG explanations; and proposals to overcome the perceived difficulties.

Results:

At the moment 7/16 Co-ordinators of the Iberoamerican Branches have answered the survey. From 51 titles proposed
during the last two years, 29 were finally registered (56.9%). The mean time to register a title is 43.9+-28.9 days (median 30 days). The reasons for rejections were: topic already covered by a title in the process of registering, topic overlaps with an already published Cochrane protocol/review, topic falls out of the scope of the CRG, too narrow spectrum of the population/intervention, topic already undertaken in a non-Cochrane review. Fifty per cent of the respondents received "satisfactory answers" a few times while the other 50% received them many times. Forty per cent of the respondents shared these reasons many times but 60% never did or only a few times. Suggestions to overcome the difficulties were: formalising appeal instances for rejections; presenting transparent information on the websites including the reasons for a rejection and comments of the applicants; avoiding title hijacking (title was registered for three years); presenting solid and detailed arguments for the rejection.

Conclusions:

The growing difficulty in registering titles within the CRG, due to the increasing number of Cochrane authors, leads to disappointment and dissatisfaction of the authors with the reasons for rejection. Probably a more transparent and informative process, and a homogeneous application of the title policies would help to maintain their enthusiasm.