For handsearchers & TSCs

For Trials Search Co-ordinators (TSCs)

• TSC User Guide to Managing Specialized Registers and Handsearch Records (Version 1.1, 4/8/08, PDF)

• Guide for TSCs (Version 5, December 2004, PDF) produced by Liz Dooley and Dymphna Hermans

• TSC e-mail discussion list

• Deadlines for submission of specialised registers and handsearch registers

• Journal Handsearch Registration Form

For Handsearchers

The US Cochrane Center maintains the main source of training materials and databases for these handsearchers. Their site includes:

Databases and procedural documents:

• The Handsearcher Training Manual (December 2002, PDF)
• Master List of Journals Being Searched (Master List) - the home page for information about the Master List, including submission resources and downloads of the MS Excel-format master list and the journal list.

Training resources:

• Handsearching: Identifying and Classifying Controlled Trial Reports - a free-of-charge online handsearching course designed and hosted by the US Cochrane Center.
  Learning to identify and classify reports of controlled trials - examples of various types of study designs and how they should be classified - illustrated with MEDLINE abstracts, presented at Cochrane Colloquium, Cape Town, October 2000 by the US Cochrane Center.

Additional resources:

• Deadlines for submission of specialized registers and handsearch registers
• Oral Health Review Group Journal Handsearchers’ Manual (Revised June 2010, PDF)

Why do handsearching?

Collaborators around the world are hand searching health care journals and conference proceedings. Why?

The aims of The Cochrane Collaboration are "preparing, maintaining and disseminating systematic reviews of the effects of health care". Before one can prepare a systematic review, one has to find the relevant research reports; in the case of The Cochrane Collaboration, this usually means reports of randomised clinical trials. This can be surprisingly difficult. Cochrane review authors rely on several means of searching for relevant reports, including both electronic and manual methods. For complete identification of published reports, there appears to be no alternative to a page-by-page search of the literature.

Hundreds of journals have been or are being hand searched by members of The Cochrane Collaboration, some journals by as few as one and others by as many as 32 individual searchers. As of this writing, an estimated 1,000 searchers are contributing to this effort, by searching for and cataloguing trials from more than 2,000 journals. As more trials are identified, it will be possible to prepare, maintain and disseminate increasing numbers of systematic reviews.