The Cochrane CollaborationMaking the results of controlled trials properly accessible.

The Cochrane Centre in Oxford was officially opened in November 1992, and is perhaps the most visible part so far of the recently launched National Health Service Research and Development Programme. Its task is to facilitate and extend the creation of systematic reviews of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) evaluating health care. It is named after Archie Cochrane (1909-1988), the epidemiologist who first emphasized that reliable information from RCTs, together with other essential information, is vital for making sound decisions in health care and research. Most clinicians and clinical scientists who have tried to review the evidence for a particular procedure or treatment have felt frustrated by the difficulties of finding out what RCTs have been done, and of interpreting their results critically. The UK Cochrane Centre is just one element of the rapidly evolving Cochrane Collaboration. Together with Cochrane Centres in Denmark and Canada and probably also in Australia, Italy and the United States, the Cochrane Collaboration will help to assemble and disseminate evidence derived from systematic reviews ofRCTs. These differ from traditional reviews in that they are prepared as methodically and as meticulously as a piece of primary research, and they include a detailed description of the wav in which the trials were identified, selected and evaluated. Specifically, the Cochrane Collaboration is working to build and maintain a database of systematic, up-to-date reviews of RCTs of health care, and to make them readily accessible through electronic media. The staffofthe UK Cochrane Centre is small: the director, lain Chalmers (who founded the National Perinatal Epidemiology Unit and edited the Oxford Database of Perinatal Trials),' myself as a part-time consultant, a computer programmer, an information specialist, an editorial coordinator, an administrator and a secretary. The UK Cochrane Centre is linked with the Clinical Trial Service Unit at Oxford University, the Department of Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics at McMaster University, and The Online Journal of Current Clinical Trials2 published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science.