Introduction If we are asked how effective mefloquine is in preventing malaria, our response might tell our questioner a lot about how we learn about the world around us, how we assimilate that knowledge and experience, and how it influences our subsequent decision making and action. Thirty years ago, Archie Cochrane drew attention to the haphazard way in which the research evidence about the e...

Clive E. Adams, Evandro S. F. Coutinho, John Davis, Lorna Duggan, Stefan Leucht, Chunbo Li, and Prathap Tharyan Division of Psychiatry, University of Nottingham, UK; Department of Epidemiology and Quantitative Methods, ENSP-FIOCRUZ, Brazil; Psychiatric Institute, University of Illinois at Chicago; St Andrew’s Hospital, UK; Klinik für Psychiatrie und Psychotherapie, Munich, Germany; Department o...

BACKGROUND Cochrane collaboration has made a huge contribution to the development of evidence-based medicine; Cochrane work is the international gold standard of independent, credible and reliable high-quality information in medicine. Over the past 20 years the Cochrane Collaboration helped transforming decision-making in health and reforming it significantly, saving lives and contributing to l...

Over the last 10 years, the advent of evidence-based medicine has caused a paradigm shift in medical thinking and clinical practice. The Cochrane Skin Group organizes, drafts, publishes, and updates systematic reviews of randomized clinical trials of therapeutic interventions in skin diseases to assist in evidence-based clinical decision making. This article provides background information on t...