Development of evidence-based medicine: From the perspective og the Cochrane Colloquium

Article type
Authors
Ling J1, Liu Y2, Tian J1, Yang K1
11. Evidence-Based Medicine Center, School of Basic Medical Sciences, Lanzhou University, Lanzhou, China 2. Key Laboratory of Evidence-Based Medicine and Knowledge Translation of Gansu Province, Lanzhou, China
2School of public Health of Lanzhou University, Lanzhou Gansu, 730000, China
Abstract
Background: Evidence-based medicine (EBM) integrates clinical experience and patient values with the best-available research information. The future holds promise for improved primary research, better EBM summaries, greater access to these summaries, and better implementation systems for evidence-based practice. The Cochrane Collaboration (CC) is a unique, worldwide not-for-profit organisation that aims to help people make well-informed decisions about healthcare, the Cochrane Colloquium can maintain and disseminate systematic reviews of healthcare interventions in order to assess the effects of healthcare practices.

Objectives: To retrospectively analyse the accepted abstracts from the Cochrane Colloquiums in the past six years, so as to learn the advances and development trends for the next stage in evidence-based medicine field.

Methods: We collected abstracts accepted by the 19th to 24rd Cochrane Colloquiums and extracted relevant information, including the countries, authors, contributing institutions, the top topics and so on. The number and proportion were also calculated then a descriptive analysis was conducted.

Results: A total of 2403 abstracts were accepted in recent six Cochrane Colloquiums. Europe contributed the most abstracts - in the top 10 contribution countries, five countries were located in Europe. Colleges/Universities were the major contributing institutes, McMaster University of Canada (183, 7.62%) and Lanzhou University of China (134, 5.57%) were the top two contributing institutions. The number of authors of most accepted abstracts were 3 to 5 (1215, 50.56%). The top three topics focused by these abstracts were evidence (475, 19.77%), methodology (491, 20.43%) and risk of bias (267, 11.11%).

Conclusions: European countries are major contributing countries of abstracts of the Cochrane Colloquium, and colleges/universities are the major contributing institutions. Retrieval and methodology are research hot topics in the past 6 years. Attention should be paid to breakthrough progress in methodology in future.