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Introducing GRADEpro® and new features in RevMan 5.

Monica Kjeldstrøm, Andy Oxman and Gunn Vist.
Nordic Cochrane Centre.
Marco Canfora.
Italian National Cancer Institute, Rome, Italy.
Holger Schünemann.
Applicability and Recommendations Methods Group.

hjs doesnotexist@cochrane.org buffalo.edu

Objective: At the end of the workshop, review authors and others involved in the preparation of Cochrane reviews will know about the new features that will be included in RevMan 5, the use of the new release of GRADEpro® and how the two programs will interact.

Summary: This workshop will have two aims. Firstly to introduce the audience to the new features that will become available to review authors when RevMan 5 is released in 2007, and secondly to introduce the review authors to the software GRADEpro® which is used for preparing Summary of Findings (SoF) tables - a new important addition to the next generation of Cochrane reviews that is currently being piloted within The Cochrane Collaboration.

When RevMan 5 is released in 2007, it will be the first mandatory release since version 4 was released in 1999. RevMan 5 will support the preparation of three types of reviews: standard (intervention) reviews, methodology reviews and reviews of the accuracy of diagnostic tests. Reviews in RevMan 5 format will be treated as one coherent document that are easily checked in and out of The Cochrane Collaboration's central IMS server, Archie. RevMan 5 will offer improved tracking of changes in reviews, more formatting options, including advanced tables that among other things allow the inclusion of a Summary of Findings table.

The Grading of Recommendations, Assessment, Development and Evaluation working group has developed a system to evaluate the strength of recommendations and quality of evidence for inclusion in SoF tables in Cochrane reviews. An earlier version of the GRADEpro® software application facilitated the development of SoF tables but required greater user friendliness. A new version of GRADEpro® that allows direct information entry into evidence profiles on screen will be introduced. Quality assessments (study design, study execution and limitations, directness of evidence, sparseness of data) and summaries of the relative and absolute effects for individual outcomes are the main features of GRADEpro®.

The workshop facilitators will assume that the audience is familiar with the format of Cochrane reviews and RevMan 4.


Level of knowledge required to attend: intermediate.