The Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials (CENTRAL) is a highly concentrated source of reports of randomized and quasi-randomized controlled trials (RCTs) that publishes each month as part of Cochrane Library. CENTRAL assists Cochrane authors and other systematic reviewers around the world quickly find evidence to determine whether a treatment works.
We're pleased to announce that the May issue of CENTRAL on Cochrane Library includes approximately 14,000 references to RCTs identified from CINAHL (Cumulative Index of Nursing and Allied Health Literature) and published under license with EBSCO. CINAHL is an essential source of nursing research and publications on 17 allied health disciplines, including physical therapy, occupational therapy, nutrition and dietetics. Along with the RCTs in CENTRAL from PubMed, Embase, ClinicalTrials.gov, the World Health Organization’s International Clinical Trial Registry Platform (ICTRP), KoreaMed, and the individual registers of Cochrane Review Groups, CINAHL RCT records expand the subject area coverage of CENTRAL, making it an even more comprehensive source of RCTs.
The project to include CINAHL RCTs in CENTRAL began in September 2018 with the help of our citizen scientist platform, Cochrane Crowd. Cochrane Crowd is a global community of volunteers who are helping to classify the research needed to support informed decision-making about health care. The job of the Cochrane Crowd community is to review descriptions of research studies to identify and classify RCTs. Reports of RCTs are then fed into Cochrane’s Central Register of Controlled Trials.
Thanks to the efforts of the Cochrane Crowd community, Cochrane's Centralised Search Service Project Team and our colleagues at EBSCO, Metaxis, Wiley and HighWire, we are now adding CINAHL RCT records to CENTRAL. We will publish a “backlog” over the next three months that will contain older references as well as newer ones. New CINAHL records available from CENTRAL may increase results for saved searches. By August, we'll add new CINAHL RCTs to CENTRAL monthly just as we do for our other sources.