Background: Cochrane Nutrition aims to support and enable evidence-informed decision-making for nutrition policy and practice by advancing the preparation and use of high quality, relevant nutrition reviews. Supporting the use of Cochrane nutrition reviews includes making them easy to find.
Objectives: To develop and maintain a categorised repository of nutrition-relevant Cochrane systematic reviews available to evidence users on our website.
Methods: We screened titles, abstracts and, if necessary, full-texts of all reviews and protocols in the Cochrane Library (CL) using prespecified eligibility criteria to identify and extract nutrition-relevant records into a categorised repository. We developed a two-layer categorisation approach: layer-1 with 36 broad health categories informed by the Cochrane topics list; and layer-2 with 14 categories, a taxonomy we created categorising types of nutrition interventions/strategies. These categorisations are applied to all included nutrition records, ‘tagging’ them in Archie according to the most relevant categories. The repository is available on Cochrane Nutrition’s website’s “Evidence” page, hyperlinking to the CL. Regular screening and tagging ensures this resource stays updated.
Results: We have screened 11,402 records, including 725 reviews (including 6 overviews) and 120 protocols in the repository (January 2023). Broad layer-1 categories with the most nutrition reviews and protocols include child health (387), pregnancy and childbirth (188), endocrine and metabolic (184), and neonatal (181). The type of intervention tagged most frequently is micronutrient supplementation (488), followed by diets and dietary patterns (304), delivery and implementation strategies (291), nutrition education, communication, and support (270), and macronutrient supplementation (266). The “Evidence” page is the mostly frequently viewed webpage on the website, with most users from the USA, followed by the UK (Google Analytics).
Conclusions: The Cochrane Nutrition reviews repository provides a nutrition lens on the CL. Evidence users can easily find and access nutrition-relevant reviews and protocols within their topic and intervention area of interest, also helping them to identify gaps where reviews are unavailable. Users have provided positive feedback about the value this resource in review question development. Patient, public, and/or healthcare consumer involvement: This resource makes it easy for patients, public and healthcare consumers to find and access nutrition relevant Cochrane evidence.