In September 2017 the Cochrane Skin Group celebrated running for 20 years, and we are proud of the 100+ high quality systematic reviews that have been produced over that period. Our expanding portfolio, and the increasing number of non-Cochrane systematic reviews, meant that we needed to take stock and prioritise Cochrane Skin reviews going forward. We need to ensure that Cochrane Skin reviews are the reviews most needed by our stakeholders. We are particularly interested in reviews that are key to informing guidelines or policy, or that are funded by our stakeholders. We are also interested in doing methodologically challenging systematic reviews that involve techniques such as network meta-analysis, individual patient meta-analysis and diagnostic test accuracy reviews.

With this in mind, we have been carrying out prioritisation exercises on a regular basis since 2017 , asking for suggestions from a wide range of stakeholders about what reviews or updates they would like us to prioritise over the next 3 years. Our aim was to identify titles which were 1) key to informing guidelines or policy, 2) not already well-covered by a Cochrane systematic review, and 3) of maximum clinical importance and greatest relevance to patients and health care funders.

Methodology

We consulted a wide range of stakeholders (such as professional societies, guideline development groups, the CSG membership and patient representatives) to ask for title suggestions. We then reviewed prioritisation exercises undertaken by the James Lind Alliance (JLA) and others and suggestions for further research made by national and international guideline groups. Furthermore, skin disorders identified as carrying a significant global burden in the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) project and their representation in the CSG portfolio were considered and gaps identified. We were open to suggestions of completely new review questions that had never been registered, as well as updates of existing reviews where there may be important new evidence. We asked that suggestions were about healthcare interventions, i.e. the effectiveness of different approaches to preventing, treating or diagnosing skin disease. After gathering all title suggestions and incorporating wider dermatological research results, a final shortlist was sent to our international editors, who rated their preferences.