Background: Cochrane Clinical Answers (CCAs; www.cochraneclinicalanswers.com) aim to place the results of Cochrane Reviews within the context of current clinical practice, and in doing so, increase the usage of reviews to inform healthcare decisions. With over 6000 reviews on the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, and up to 50 new reviews being published every month, prioritising is an essential part of the CCA production process.

Objective: To describe the criteria used to select Cochrane Reviews for CCA production.

Methods: The CCA team developed a selection strategy based on criteria relating to: the relevance and generalisability of the clinical question; the currency of the review; the volume of evidence; and, sometimes, the analysis used in the review.

Results: We will detail the selection criteria used by the CCA editors, along with the justification for those choices. Our selection criteria favors recent reviews with larger population sizes; this means that there tend to be more CCAs based on reviews from larger, higher producing Cochrane Review Groups (those with additional capacity to produce newer reviews and to update existing ones) and more CCAs about those disease areas with larger trials.

Conclusions: Selecting reviews on which to base CCAs is a challenge. We aim to provide CCAs for those reviews that are likely to have high usage, and where interpretation of the evidence could be most beneficial for clinicians and other healthcare professionals who are expected to make decisions at the point-of-care.