Improving the experience of Cochrane podcast listeners: a Croatian case study

Tags: Poster
Zakarija-Grkovic I1
1Cochrane Croatia, University of Split School of Medicine, Split

Background: Cochrane podcasts provide a 3 to 4 minute summary of 'mediagenic' Cochrane Reviews and are delivered in an audio format, freely available on the Cochrane website. The Cochrane Library podcast project was launched in January 2008 and had produced over 1100 podcasts, in more than 30 languages, as of April 2019. The opportunity to record non-English-language podcasts has been offered to all international author teams since January 2009. If an author is interested in recording a podcast in their native language, the script used for the English podcast is translated, recorded and then published alongside the English version to ensure they are accessible to interested listeners. Since 2015, Cochrane Croatia has been involved in the translation and recording of Cochrane podcasts, thanks to three grants received from the Croatian Ministry of Science and Education for the ‘Popularization of Science’. So far, over 100 translated podcasts have been published and are accessible via the Cochrane website, Cochrane Library, Cochrane Croatia website/Facebook page/Twitter Account and iTunes. They are also regularly aired on a local radio station.

Objectives: to find out who is listening to Croatian Cochrane podcasts, how Croatian Cochrane podcasts are discovered and accessed, and to explore listeners’ opinions on podcast content and format.

Methods: a four-page, 27-item questionnaire was compiled and uploaded onto SurveyMonkey. An invitation and link to the survey was included in the April edition of the Cochrane Croatia newsletter and placed on the Cochrane Croatia website/Facebook page/Twitter account. The survey was also publicized on Cochrane Bosnia and Herzegovina’s website and social media. A pop-up on Croatian podcasts was placed on Cochrane.org., directing people to the survey. In addition, all 20 partner organizations and other collaborators of Cochrane Croatia who had listened to a Croatian Cochrane podcast were invited via email to participate in the survey. Reminder emails will be sent every two weeks over the course of two months. Data will be entered into Excel spreadsheets and analysed using descriptive statistics and qualitative methods.

Results: to be presented at the Cochrane Colloquium in Santiago, Chile.

Conclusions: with this case study of the user experience of Croatian Cochrane podcast listeners, we hope to provide insight into who is accessing these podcasts, which channels are being used and what listeners think of the podcast content and format. This information will be useful to all Cochrane groups looking to translate Cochrane podcasts or for those looking to fine-tune the content and process of podcasts across all languages.

Patient or healthcare consumer involvement: patients and consumers were involved in the translation and recording of Croatian Cochrane podcasts.