Objectives: To provide training and guidance for people who want to serve as systematic review editors or peer reviewers for journals as a mechanism for improving the quality of systematic reviews. We will present and discuss our experience in the Cochrane Eyes and Vision (CEV) Review Group as an example.

Description: We will complete a hands-on exercise to demonstrate common issues encountered during the editorial and peer review process. Participants will work in small groups to critically appraise excerpts from manuscripts of systematic reviews. Together, we will work to identify useful approaches for summarizing and communicating comments so as to be helpful to authors and editors. Exercise materials will be made available for those registered prior to the workshop in order to facilitate discussion of issues.

For discussion, we will present our experience of having CEV editors serve as systematic review editors and peer reviewers for specialty journals in eyes and vision. We will share the expectations, challenges, and benefits that we have come across while engaging in partnerships with journals. We will introduce and provide participants with useful tools for assessing the quality of systematic reviews, such as the MECIR (Methodological Expectations of Cochrane Intervention Reviews), ROBIS (risk of bias in systematic reviews), PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses), and AMSTAR checklists, and links to web-based training.