Background: Cochrane groups have a problem with Chinese literature. China has modernizedscientific research and the number of trials has hugely increased in the last decade (McDonald, 2006). There are problems with access and quality. Access is limited. For example, only 1% oftrials in one area of health care are found on PubMed (Chakrabarti, 2007). China has five overlapping but distinct major biomedical databases. Collectively, they index thousands of Chinese biomedical journals (Xia, 2008) and these are largely ignored by Cochrane reviewers. While the quantityofChinese papers has increased dramatically, quality is questionable (Lancet 2010). Quality assurance and governance must and will be improved, but until that researchers would have to manually select good Chinese studies from other less high quality work. If work from the whole of China is not to be disregarded - a systematic but clearly parochial approach contrary to the Collaborations' founding principles - Cochrane reviewers must be helped identify, sift, quality assure and data extract work from mainland China.

Conclusion: This work can only be undertaken efficiently by trained researchers fluent in Mandarin, scientific methods and Cochrane methodology.SR(http://www.srs-org.com) is established by a team with a track record in production and maintenanceof complex Cochrane reviews. SRS can i. help identify trials relevant to a specific review or areaof interest; ii. select relevant trials for inclusion; iii. data extract; iv. work within RevMan to allow data to be used (or not used); v. provide full translation service (often unnecessary);vi.contact authors for additional information. Each service can stand alone or be integrated intoa package. SRS will allow consideration of previously inaccessible trial data from China within Cochrane reviews and, by that, facilitate improvement of both reviews and trials.

References

Chakrabarti, A., Adams, C.E., Rathbone, J., Wright, J., Xia. J., Wong, W., Von Reibnitz, P., Koening, C., Baier, S., Pfeiffer, C., Blatter, J., Mantz, M. & Kloeckner, K. (2007). Schizophrenia trials in China: a survey. Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica. Vol 116(1), pp. 6-9.

The Lancet. (2010). Scientific fraud: action needed in China. Lancet. Vol 375(9709) pp. 94.

McDonald, J. (2006). OECD: China to spend 136 billion on R&D. Business Week. Available from: http://www.businessweek.com/ap/ financialnews/D8LQ0OI00.htm (accessed 6 December 2006).

Xia, J., Wright, J. & Adams, C.E. (2008). Five large Chinese medical bibliographic databases: accessibility and coverage. Health Informationa and Library Journal. Vol 25(1), pp. 55-61.