Background:

The Cochrane Airways Group aims to publish the reviews that are most important to today’s decision-makers. These reviews are identified in a process of prioritisation, and the next challenge is for review authors to draft, and editorial teams to edit and publish, the new reviews and updates. Goal 1 of Cochrane’s Strategy to 2020 highlights the need to “bring efficiencies and improvements to our processes and methods, allowing us to deliver our evidence to users more quickly and effectively”.
Many Cochrane Reviews are written by author teams based outside a Cochrane Review Group (CRG) editorial base, and are supported and edited by CRG staff. Since 2007, Airways has also produced reviews in-house by means of a systematic reviewer funded by an NIHR programme grant. In this poster, we want to describe the experience we had and make the results available to inform discussions within Cochrane aimed at improving review production, for example, project Transform or the various updating projects that are currently underway.

Objectives:

The poster describes what happened when we tried to engage existing author teams to update 30 priority reviews within two years (2012 to 2014).

Methods:

We invited existing review teams to either update their review, or to hand the review back to us to find new author teams. We were not able to offer funding, but we did offer additional support e.g. retrieving papers, arranging translations, assisting with screening, data extraction and considering other requests.

Results and Conclusions:

To date, 11 of the 30 review updates are published. We will provide data on the number of updates completed and the timeframe for review production together with barriers and enables. We will draw conclusions of the success of this approach and whether it has achieved the aims – or not!