Background: Cochrane Clinical Answers (CCAs; www.cochraneclinicalanswers.com) aim to place the results of Cochrane Reviews (CRs) within the context of current clinical practice and, in doing so, increase the usage of CRs to inform healthcare decisions. With over 7000 CRs on the CDSR, and up to 80 new and updated reviews published every month, prioritising is an essential part of the CCA production process.
Objectives: To describe the criteria used to select CRs for CCA production.
Methods: The CCA team developed a selection strategy based on criteria relating to the relevance and generalisability of the clinical question, the currency of the CR, the volume of evidence, and, sometimes, the analysis used.
Results: We will detail the selection criteria used by the CCA editors, along with the justification for those choices. Our selection criteria favours recent CRs with larger population sizes; hence larger, higher-producing CRGs and disease areas with larger trials.
Conclusion: Selecting CRs on which to base CCAs is a challenge. We aim to provide CCAs for those CRs that are likely to have high usage, and where interpretation of the evidence could be most beneficial for clinicians and other healthcare professionals, who are expected to make decisions at the point-of-care.