Abstract
Systematic reviews represent the core and backbone of evidence-based medicine (EBM) strategies in all fields of medicine. In order to depict a first global sketch of the international efforts in the Cochrane database systematic reviews (CDSR), we analyzed the systematic reviews of the Cochrane database. Our global maps of systematic reviewing offer intriguing structural insights into the world of EBM strategies. They demonstrate that for the CDSR, the UK and Commonwealth countries take the lead position. Since patients, care providers and health systems all over the world benefit from systematic reviewing, institutions in other countries should increase their commitment.
Highlights
We identified all relevant articles by searching the Web of Science (WoS) for the following string: PUBLICATION NAME: Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, Refined by DOCUMENT TYPES: review or article, Timespan: all years
When all countries are analyzed using density equalizing mapping, a global landscape appears, which is largely distorted towards Europe with the UK, Northern America with Canada and the USA, and Australia
We analyzed the Cochrane database systematic reviews using the NewQIS platform and density equalizing approaches and found striking contrasts to the usual global research patterns: A large study analyzed a number of 5,527,558 publications and showed the usually clear dominance in biomedicine of the USA
Summary
We used the previously established NewQIS platform to analyze all CDSR publications present in the Web of Science (WoS) Core Collection database. We identified all relevant articles by searching the WoS for the following string: PUBLICATION NAME: Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, Refined by DOCUMENT TYPES: review or article, Timespan: all years. Density-equalizing mapping projections (DEMPs) were used: In brief, DEMPs algorithms based on Gastner and Newman’s algorithm [8] were used to re-size country territories with regard to the following variables: 1) number of published items of each country, 2) the number of institutions in each country, 3) the number of citations for each country, 4) the country-specific modified Hirsch index. A modified h index was used to quantify citations of countries as previously performed in the NewQIS studies
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