CSG updates have their own prioritisation system.

Step 1: Running quick updating searches

The Collaboration advises that reviews should be updated every two years. To achieve this, a review team would have to start working on an update one year after their review was published. Therefore, when a review is published, our Information Specialist makes a calendar note to look at the review in a year later when she runs quick updating searches in MEDLINE and Embase to see if any new trials have been published. She checks how many studies are awaiting classification in the review, noting this and the date of the last fully incorporated search.

Step 2: Making a decision about whether to update

The Information Specialist’s search results are brought to the weekly editorial team meeting, and the Co-Ed brings a clinical perspective to the discussion. Based on the collated information, a decision is made – one of the following:

1. Priority update: suggest the review team start an update;
2. Non-priority update: suggest the review team wait another year before assessing again whether to update.

Step 3: Re-publishing non-priority updates in the Cochrane Library as stable or postponed for another year

Non-priority updates are further classified as postponed for another year or stable, and this decision is published on the Cochrane Library.

• After the Information Specialist’s 1^st-year searches, if it’s decided that an update is not needed right then and can be postponed for another year, we re-publish the review with an amendment and add a published note in the review to say why it’s been postponed.

• After the Information Specialist’s 2^nd-year searches, if it’s decided that an update is not needed right then and can be postponed for another year, we mark the review as stable for that year – the Information Specialist still runs an update search the following year to make sure the decision to call it stable is still the right one (if still stable after the 3rd year, we update the published note to explain that we’ve done another search and still deem it stable, and so on).