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Cochrane Handbook for Systematic Reviews of Interventions (current version)

Version 6.5, 2024

Senior Editors: Julian Higgins1, James Thomas2
Associate Editors: Jacqueline Chandler3, Miranda Cumpston4,5, Tianjing Li6, Matthew Page4, Vivian Welch7

Part 1: About Cochrane Reviews

  1. I.     Introduction
  2. II.    Planning a Cochrane Review
  3. III.   Reporting the review
  4. IV.   Updating the review
  5. V.    Overviews of Reviews

Part 2: Core methods

  1. Starting a review
  2. Determining the scope and questions
  3. Inclusion criteria & grouping for synthesis
  4. Searching & selecting studies
  5. Collecting data
  6. Effect measures
  7. Bias and conflicts of interest
  8. Risk of bias in randomized trials
  9. Preparing for synthesis
  10. Meta-analyses
  11. Network meta-analyses
  12. Synthesis using other methods
  13. Bias due to missing results
  14. ‘Summary of findings’ tables & GRADE
  15. Interpreting results

Part 3: Specific perspectives in reviews

  1. Equity
  2. Intervention complexity
  3. Patient-reported outcomes
  4. Adverse effects
  5. Economic evidence
  6. Qualitative evidence

Part 4: Other topics

  1. Prospective approaches
  2. Variants on randomized trials
  3. Including non-randomized studies
  4. Risk of bias in non-randomized studies
  5. Individual participant data

1 University of Bristol, UK
2 EPPI-Centre, UCL Social Research Institute, University College London, UK
3 Wessex Academic Health Science Network, UK 
4 School of Public Health and Preventive Medicine, Monash University, Australia
5 Cochrane Public Health; School of Medicine and Public Health, University of Newcastle, Australia
6 Department of Ophthalmology, School of Medicine & Department of Epidemiology, School of Public Health, University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus USA; Department of Epidemiology, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, USA
7 The Campbell Collaboration; Bruyère Research Institute, Ottawa, Canada; School of Epidemiology and Public Health, University of Ottawa, Canada. 


Information on how to cite this Handbook is available here.

For any queries on the Handbook, contact support@cochrane.org.

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