Are Cochrane Reviews Truly "Independent and Transparent"?


Criticisms of Cochrane reviews have surfaced since not long after the organization’s inception. In 2001, for example, the British Medical Journal (BMJ) questioned the reliability of some Cochrane reviews, describing the implications for Cochrane’s reputation as “serious.” The BMJ authors suggested that “the Cochrane Collaboration needs to clarify [explain] how it discharges its responsibilities for the quality of reviews published under its imprimatur, and how it responds when they are shown to have come to unjustified conclusions.”
A more recent examination of Cochrane reviews in 2016 concluded that while “the methodological quality of Cochrane reviews is good compared to…non-Cochrane reviews, …it would be inappropriate to assume all Cochrane reviews are good quality and are at low risk of bias.” Cochrane’s new and chummy partnership with Wikipedia to include “relevant evidence within all Wikipedia health articles,” announced in early 2017, also may raise some eyebrows given Wikipedia’s reputation for bias. All of these factors suggest that it might be time to take Cochrane’s supposedly neutral relationship with its funders with a grain of salt.
http://www.greenmedinfo.com/blog/are-cochrane-reviews-truly-independent-and-transparent

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