TY - JOUR T1 - How to make sense of a Cochrane systematic review JF - Breathe JO - Breathe SP - 134 LP - 144 DO - 10.1183/20734735.003514 VL - 10 IS - 2 AU - Christopher J. Cates AU - Elizabeth Stovold AU - Emma J. Welsh Y1 - 2014/06/01 UR - http://breathe.ersjournals.com/content/10/2/134.abstract N2 - More and more papers are published in medical journals every day, so how do you decide which ones to read and, having read a paper, how do you decide whether to change your practice as a result of what you have read? Perhaps the paper was atypical in some way. What does the other research on the topic say? The purpose of systematic reviews is to summarise all the available, high-quality evidence that can be found on a particular topic. A narrative review, in which an expert can cite a selection of papers that support a particular viewpoint, says very little about the papers that do not. In contrast, a systematic review involves a search for all available literature, whatever the findings may be. Systematic reviews start with a well-defined clinical question, and aim to identify, appraise, synthesise and then apply all the available good-quality evidence that can be found (published or unpublished) that is relevant to the question. In particular, Cochrane systematic reviews have to meet a defined set of quality standards and the authors and editors set out to make them the best around. They are the current gold standard in the systematic review field. The Cochrane Collaboration is an international group which is now 20 years old. The collaboration depends upon the voluntary contribution of thousands of authors and is supported by editorial bases and methodologists. In the UK, these bases are supported by funding from the National Institute of Health Research (NIHR), and any funding for editorial bases must be free from commercial interests. Review groups are divided up into areas of clinical interest and, within the respiratory field, there are groups for lung cancer (based in France), acute respiratory infections (based in Australia), cystic fibrosis (based in the UK) and airways (based in the UK … ER -