Roles of the members of the Cochrane Skin Group in alphabetical order include:

Authors: Responsible for summarising the evidence. They are responsible for producing high quality reviews and keeping them up to date. This involves: designing a protocol; identifying relevant trials (with the Review Group Coordinator); deciding which trials to include; extracting the relevant data; entering the review into the Review Manager (RevMan) software; adding new data as these become available; responding to comments and criticisms.

Co-Authors: It is preferable to have more than one reviewer working on a review; reviewers generally work in multidisciplinary teams. We need members to collaborate with others to produce high quality reviews.

Consumers: We aim to develop a high level of consumer input, and encourage consumers and their representatives to participate as reviewers, co-reviewers, referees, translators, disseminators.

Disseminators: Our reviews are the most readily identifiable products of the Group. These are published in the Cochrane Library. Their results also need to be made readily available, in more accessible media and non-technical language, to consumers, managers, and other groups. The Skin Group needs members who can turn reviews into more easily comprehensible literature for the more popular media.

Handsearchers: Although electronic databases are good sources of published reports of trials, many of these trials are not identified as such, and many trials are not included in these databases. Manual, page by page searching of the literature is the best way of identifying all the relevant trials.  In the meantime, the Skin Group needs to make its own contribution to that effort by handsearching its own quota of the literature for trials.

Volunteers: Volunteers are needed for advocacy and administrative support for the Group.

Statisticians: Assist authors with addressing the way in which the extracted data will be analysed

Translators: Many of the relevant trials have not been published in the English language. For completeness, these need to be translated and made available for reviews.