COCH is produced by the Cochrane Collaboration - an international network of individuals and institutions committed to preparing, maintaining, and disseminating systematic reviews of the effects of health care. In pursuing its aims, the Cochrane Collaboration is guided by six principles: collaboration, building on people's existing enthusiasm and interests, minimizing duplication of effort, avoidance of bias, keeping up to date, and ensuring access.
Reflecting the current practice in medicine to base clinical decisions on accumulated evidence from the primary medical literature, Ovid has created a collection of resources called Evidence-Based Medicine Reviews which is designed for use by clinicians, researchers and students. The Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews is one of the databases in Ovid's evidence-based medicine collection, which also includes the Database of Abstracts of Reviews of Effectiveness (DARE) and Best Evidence (which consists of ACP Journal Club from the American College of Physicians-American Society for Internal Medicine [ACP-ASIM] and Evidence Based Medicine from the BMJ Publishing Group).
In Medline a limit to Evidence-Based Medicine Reviews will restrict your retrieval to those articles or studies that have been included by the Cochrane Collaboration when creating a Topic Review or articles that have been reviewed in the ACP Journal Club or BMJ Evidence-Based Medicine publications or in the Database of Abstracts of Reviews of Effectiveness (DARE). By their inclusion in these publications, these studies have met strict Evidence-Based Medicine criteria. Use this limit to narrow a large search to only those articles or studies which are considered "Evidence-Based" by experts and for which an article or topic review exists.
