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Abstract
Background: Up-to-date evidence relevant to prevention and treatment of any health-related events are important information for healthcare decision-making and services. The Cochrane Collaboration policy is that Cochrane systematic reviews should be updated within two years. However, development of preventive and therapeutic interventions can changed and differed over timeSystematic reviews of the 52 Cochrane review groups may be updated at different time periods.
Objectives: This paper will present time to updating systematic reviews of Cochrane review groups.
Methods: The original cohort of Cochrane systematic reviews firstly published in the Cochrane Library between January 2000 and December 2005 were studied. Update versions of the cohort reviews until 2011 issue 4 were independently searched by two authors in the Cochrane Archie server and Cochrane Library. We defined 'updateá following the suggestions in the Cochrane handbook. Time to update was measured from the date of current update version and the date of previous consecutive version. Disagreement between the two authors throughout the review was solved by consensus and discussed with the third author. The median survival time of updating and its 95% confidence interval (CI) was analyzed by using STATA software. Results and Conclusions: There were 623 Cochrane reviews from 47 review groups. Median survival time to update of the reviews was 1.8 years (95% CI 1.6, 1.9 years). Fifty five percent of them were lastly updated before 2 years. The top three groups that had large number of update reviews were Airways Group (56 reviews), Pregnancy and Childbirth Group (46 reviews), and Neonatal Group (40 reviews) with median survival time to update equal to 2.0 years (95% CI 1.4, 2.6 years), 1.6 years (95% CI 0.6, 2.5 years) and 1.7 years (95% CI 1.0, 2.5 years), respectively.
Objectives: This paper will present time to updating systematic reviews of Cochrane review groups.
Methods: The original cohort of Cochrane systematic reviews firstly published in the Cochrane Library between January 2000 and December 2005 were studied. Update versions of the cohort reviews until 2011 issue 4 were independently searched by two authors in the Cochrane Archie server and Cochrane Library. We defined 'updateá following the suggestions in the Cochrane handbook. Time to update was measured from the date of current update version and the date of previous consecutive version. Disagreement between the two authors throughout the review was solved by consensus and discussed with the third author. The median survival time of updating and its 95% confidence interval (CI) was analyzed by using STATA software. Results and Conclusions: There were 623 Cochrane reviews from 47 review groups. Median survival time to update of the reviews was 1.8 years (95% CI 1.6, 1.9 years). Fifty five percent of them were lastly updated before 2 years. The top three groups that had large number of update reviews were Airways Group (56 reviews), Pregnancy and Childbirth Group (46 reviews), and Neonatal Group (40 reviews) with median survival time to update equal to 2.0 years (95% CI 1.4, 2.6 years), 1.6 years (95% CI 0.6, 2.5 years) and 1.7 years (95% CI 1.0, 2.5 years), respectively.