Ahmed

Apologies for the late reply – I am travelling and have been without internet access for some days.

The practice described in the ETE paper, to which you refer below, continued until 2011 (i.e. records added to Embase in 2010). At that point the UK Cochrane Centre discontinued its role in this project and The Cochrane Collaboration has recently issued and Invitation to Tender for this work to be continued elsewhere.

I hope this clarifies this for you?

with best wishes

Carol

Thanks Julie and Carol. Carol, in your original paper on the integration of Embase into CENTRAL (Lefebvre C, Eisinga A, McDonald S, Paul N. Enhancing access to reports of randomized trials published world-wide--the contribution of EMBASE records to the Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials (CENTRAL) in The Cochrane Library. Emerg Themes Epidemiol. 2008 Sep 30;5:13), you reported that your team hand-searched the citations from Embase to identify randomized controlled trials and controlled clinical trials for inclusion in CENTRAL. Therefore, my question relates to whether or not this practice has continued or whether a search was done in Medline (or Embase) and imported into CENTRAL without any further scrutiny, retagging or rejection of tags placed by the original tagging agency. I see the pros and cons of both approaches and am interested in understanding this process further.

Thanks again.

Ahmed

Ahmed et al

In addition to Julie’s response below, if you are interested in reading more about how CENTRAL is created with respect to the indexing, please refer to the CENTRAL Creation Details file in The Cochrane Library at:

http://www.thecochranelibrary.com/view/0/CENTRALHelp.html

With best wishes

Carol

Carol Lefebvre

Independent Information Consultant, Lefebvre Associates Ltd, Oxford, UK

Co-Convenor, Cochrane Information Retrieval Methods Group

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From: Evidence based health (EBH) [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Julie Glanville
Sent: 25 September 2012 07:41
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Tagging of publication reports in bibliographic databases

Hello Ahmed, I can answer one of your questions I think - the indexing that you see on the records on CENTRAL which have been obtained from MEDLINE or EMBASE contain the indexing supplied by NLM or Elsevier - no additional MeSH or EMTREE subject headings are added by the publishers of the Cochrane Library. Other records on the Cochrane Library may have no indexing, author supplied indexing or indexing from another controlled vocabulary, depending on their origin. This variety of indexing within CENTRAL  means that searches need to be equally varied (sensitive)  to capture different vocabularies which may be in play.