Cochrane's plain-language rule
Cochrane · The plain-language summary standard, applied to thousands of reviews.
Cochrane produces systematic reviews - structured searches for every study on a question, with the results combined where that is sensible - and writes a plain-language summary of each one. What makes those summaries unusual is that the headings never change, and one of them is a question most health writing quietly omits: what are the limitations of the evidence? Because the heading is always there, a weak result cannot be presented as a strong one by leaving the caveat out.
The headings Cochrane uses, and so do we
- 01Key messages
- 02What did we want to find out?
- 03What did we do?
- 04What did we find?
- 05What are the limitations of the evidence?
- 06How up to date is this evidence?
What this changes here
Our reading, not theirs.
Our evidence briefs are written under these headings, with one addition: a bottom line that names how strong the evidence is in one of five phrases and says what, if anything, it changes here. Cochrane also bans jargon from its summaries, including the word it uses for certainty, on the grounds that a reader should not have to learn a vocabulary to be told how confident to be. We have tried to follow that.
Read the original
Where to go next
The other work we read