On the website of Cochrane, an information partner of the journal Safety and Risk of Pharmacotherapy, a new concept for evidence synthesis for a changing world has been published.

With a 30-year history of producing systematic reviews, Cochrane acknowledges their limitations in the era of artificial intelligence (AI) and misinformation. The ways in which people around the world find, access, and use information have fundamentally changed, accelerated by the proliferation of AI tools. Cochrane is joining the Evidence Synthesis Infrastructure Collaborative (ESIC), an initiative supported by the Wellcome Trust. This collaboration emphasizes a shift from static reviews to a dynamic system designed to support rapid decision-making in healthcare. The key steps include:

• scaling CENTRAL and Cochrane Crowd*: Expanding the research database and volunteer platform using machine learning to curate randomized controlled trials and other primary studies;
• AI Integration: Automating data classification and processing with expert oversight;
• focus on Health Equity: prioritizing open contribution from all regions of the world (Africa, Asia, Latin America) to democratize access to data.

* CENTRAL (Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials) is the world’s largest database of randomized and quasi-randomized controlled trials (RCTs). It contains bibliographic information, abstracts, and references from PubMed, Embase, ClinicalTrials.gov, and other sources. Updated monthly, it serves as the foundation for Cochrane systematic reviews.

Cochrane Crowd is Cochrane’s crowdsourcing platform where volunteers (including members of the public and experts) help identify and classify reports of clinical trials for CENTRAL. It uses machine learning to accelerate this work, engaging thousands of contributors worldwide.

For more information:
Original (English): https://www.cochrane.org/about-us/news/reimagining-evidence-synthesis-changing-world