Background:Medical students, especially in developing countries, face many barriers in their way to research the world: Lack of funding, poor laboratories, limited technical support, little available training, few tutors or mentors, weak peer networks and the unclear relationship between research and academic reward. Engaging medical students in writing Cochrane systematic reviews will be helpful to bridge the gap between students' dreams and enrollment in the research world.

Objectives: To evaluate if the engaging medical student from Syrian Universities helped them to be part of the research community.

Methods: We searched the Cochrane Library for 'Syria' or 'The Syrian Arab Republic' then we sent a survey (Figure 1) to authors who were medical students.

Results: Of 24 medical students, 11 (45.8%) knew about Cochrane from friends, 16 (66.7%) had no previous experience in research, 18 (75%) chose the available topic, 20 (83.3) didn’t know how to do peer review before working in Cochrane, 18 (75%) knew about the EBM (evidence-based medicine), 13 (54.2%) didn’t work with another review, 18 (75%) didn’t publish a full review. The most frequent group was the Schizophrenia group.

Conclusions: Engaging medical students in writing Cochrane systematic reviews has surely solidified their knowledge and understanding of evidence-based medicine, and has inspired them to do more systematic reviews and research. It needs to be perfected further.