Cochrane neonatal systematic reviews: a survey of the evidence for neonatal therapies

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Methods

This survey is based on the Cochrane neonatal reviews contained in The Cochrane Library, Disk Issue 3, 2001. The authors sorted these reviews by topic and listed them according to the subject tree structure as described in the CNRGs original statement of scope of work. For each review, data were extracted to address the following issues:

  • A priori statement of objectives

  • Concordance of review methodology with the CNRGs policies for the conduct of systematic reviews

  • Characteristics of included

Growth of output of Cochrane Neonatal Review Group

Fig. 1 shows the steady increase over the past 5 years in the numbers of protocols, reviews, and review updates added to the Neonatal Module of The Cochrane Library. Early, the growth was most striking in the number of protocols; later, in the number of completed reviews and, most recently, in the number of review updates.

Issue 3, 2001, the issue of The Cochrane Library on which this survey is based, contains 113 completed systematic reviews prepared by 108 members of the CNRG. Of these, 3

Discussion

The science of systematically reviewing a body of data has grown rapidly over the past 20 years, although Chalmers et al [8] point to early examples of research synthesis dating from at least 100 years ago. In 1904, Pearson [9] reviewed the correlations between antityphoid inoculation and immunity (five studies) and between inoculation and mortality (six studies), and synthesized the data by calculating the average correlation coefficient for each set of studies. A scientifically more

Summary

A survey is reported of 113 systematic reviews of therapies in neonatology, based on 559 eligible randomized trials in total. These reviews were prepared by the CNRG and were published in the Cochrane Library, Issue 3, 2001. The median number of included trials per review was 3 (range 0 to 32) and participants 207 (range 0 to 5460). Among 90 reviews with a categorical primary outcome, the median number of outcome events per review was 54 (range 1 to 1284). Among reviews finding a statistically

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to Mike Clarke, David J. Henderson-Smart, and Linda L. Wright for their comments on an earlier draft of this article.

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The authors are the administrator (DH) and editors (JS, MB, JH, RS) of the Cochrane Neonatal Review Group and are recipients of Contract N01-HD-6-3252 from National Institute of Child Health and Human Development for the support of the preparation and maintenance of Cochrane neonatal reviews.

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