Trusted evidence. Informed decisions. Better health.

Issue 11 | January 2022 (next issue March 2022)

ECP Network News and Announcements

We are pleased to announce that we have launched a series of informative and engaging Cochrane Blog Posts which will be posted under the Cochrane Community Blogs section. The aim of this initiative is to encourage discussion about evidence and simplify it through blog posts.

In our inaugural blog post, Dr. Luis Enrique Colunga-Lozano shares with us a comprehensive and simplified explanation of the Grading of Recommendations Assessment, Development and Evaluation (GRADE) approach to the assessment of the certainty of evidence. The blog post provides a summary for researchers that are not familiar with the GRADE approach as well as additional useful resources.

News from our members

Dr. Jana Stojanova, Senior Hospital Scientist, Department of Clinical Pharmacology & Toxicology, St Vincent's Hospital Sydney. Associate Professor of Pharmacology, School of Medicine, University of Valparaiso

Dr. Jana Stojanova from our steering group and the organizing committee of the Evidence Synthesis & Meta-Analysis in R Conference, shares with us details about this exciting conference which will be held on February 21^st- 24^th of this year.

“The program is really exciting and has lots to offer for Early Career Professionals. There are seven hands-on workshops and eight sessions for oral presentations. It is especially exciting that presentations will be subtitled in non-English languages, Spanish and Arabic. There are also bursaries available to support people in attending, for example, for childcare or for those that need to hire a room to be able to attend uninterrupted. The preliminary programme is available here. All sessions will be streamed live and will be immediately available on the ESMARConf YouTube channel.

My pick for ECPs from the programme:

(21/2) Full-day workshop:Intro to meta-analysis in R

(22/2) Oral: Automating data-cleaning and documentation of extracted data

(23/2) Oral: What if...? A very short primer on multiverse meta-analyses in R

(23/2) Workshop: Collaborative coding and version control: intro to Git/GitHub

(24/2) Workshop: Intro to writing R functions/packages

(24/2) Workshop: Wrangling large teams for research synthesis

(24/2) Oral session: Developing the synthesis community - this whole session looks 👌”

Dr. Ahmad Sofi-Mahmudi, Dentist, Translation Manager at Cochrane Iran, Steering Group Member of Non-Communicable Diseases Research Centre Oral Health Department

Congratulations to our steering group member, Dr. Ahmad Sofi-Mahmoud, who has been awarded his first research grant (awarded amount is about 11K USD) from the National Institute for Medical Research Development in Iran! Dr. Sofi-Mahmoud will be working on a project entitled “Identifying Evidence Gaps in Dentistry: Part 1, Dental Caries.” The project is a meta-research study with the aim of identifying gaps in the dentistry and oral health literature. Systematic reviews will be retrieved using the L·OVE Platform.

Have you recently published a paper, presented at a conference, written a blog, or done something amazing that you want to share? Send us a brief description, your Twitter handle, and a headshot (if you wish) to ecp@ochrane.org to be featured in our upcoming newsletter.

Trainings and events

Our first English Journal Club of 2022 will take place on Thursday 24^th February at 5pm GMT! Dr. Adrian Soto-Mota will be leading a discussion on ‘Ketone bodies and the hallmarks of ageing’ and Mauricio Moel-Miranda will discuss ‘Why are there no Keto products in hospitals or clinics?’ Further login details will follow!

Upcoming opportunities

📢 The Evidence Synthesis Hackathon’s online Evidence Synthesis & Meta-Analysis in R Conference will be held on February 21^st to 24^th. Check out their exciting programme of sessions, workshops, and hackathons here.

📢 Evidence Synthesis Fellowship opportunity available for individual from the island of Ireland, with Dr. Sinead Hynes and Dr. Trudy Bekkering on Occupational Therapy for Multiple Sclerosis on a Cochrane review. More details are available here. Deadline Feb 9.

📢 Call for Abstracts: The European Resuscitation Council is organizing their first hybrid conference in Antwerp, Belgium on 16 and 17 June, 2022. The call for abstracts is open now. Submit your abstract, share your research on resuscitation and join the ERC family. More information and the submission link can be found here. Deadline Feb 24.

📢 Call for Abstracts: Pluralizing Global Mental Health: Care, Crisis, and Critique: The 2022 Edinburgh Centre for Medical Anthropology conference (9-10 June 2022) invites contributions from across the social, health and behavioral sciences that explore global mental health care, its alleged crisis, and its critiques. Please submit 200-word abstracts for individual papers to: EDCMA.conference2022@ed.ac.uk. Deadline Feb 28.

📢 Call for Abstracts: Sleep and Digital Health: Multidisciplinary Perspectives: as a recent article in Nature puts it, we are facing a “data-driven revolution in sleep science and medicine”. This online conference (27-28 June 2022) seeks to interrogate this “revolution”, in both its promising applications, such as the potential to monitor patients beyond the sleep lab and the ability to give more people access to treatment, and in its possible risks, such as orthosomnia and data-privacy concerns. Please send 250-word abstracts and a 50-word biographical note to the conference organizer, Dr. Diletta De Cristofaro. Deadline March 14.

📢 Have you or someone you care for been diagnosed with COPD? Cochrane Airways is conducting a new review on magnesium sulfate for treating COPD and would like to get feedback and comments. More information can be found here.

Training resources

📢 Cochrane authors, would you like some advice on writing the 'implications for research' section of your review? Sign up here for a web clinic on 10th February, hosted by Cochrane Methods , to hear from Toby Lasserson of Cochrane.

📢 FREE Lifeology course explains what an infodemic is and how to slow the spread of misinformation! Available in English, Malay, Spanish and French! Check it out here!

📢 New modules now available for Cochrane's Evidence Essentials! Check out this FREE resource from Cochrane Training - offering an intro to health evidence, and how to use it to make informed health choices.

📢 ALBA-WWN Webinar: As part of the webinar series on region-specific diversity issues, ALBA is partnering with World Women in Neuroscience to address diversity issues across the Sub-Saharan African neuroscience community. Join the discussion during the ALBA-WWN Webinar: W hat it takes to succeed as a neuroscientist in Africa on Wednesday 2 February 2022 at 2-3.30 pm CET & WAST / 3-4.30 pm SAST / 8-9.30 am EST. Further information on the event can be found here. Registration is FREE and you can register here.

📢 The PICO Portal assists with identifying relevant citations, de-duplication, screening, full-text review, and evidence mapping using machine learning and natural language processing algorithmns. If you'd like to learn more, join Cochrane US for a presentation on February 23^rd to learn more about how the tools work, a live demo, and a Q&A session. Registration is FREE and you can register here.

📢 Are you still in University? Teaching classes about evidence-based healthcare? Cochrane UK has rounded up some valuable resources for you here.

📢 How to develop a systematic review protocol: An introduction to Cochrane methodology: 4-8 April 2022 by Cochrane Sweden he re.

Learning Live is a series of monthly webinars open to everyone and an archive of previous webinars. Upcoming webinars:

- NMAstudio: a fully interactive tool for network meta-analyses (10 February)

- Thematic Synthesis *QES webinar series* (24 February)

- Meta-ethnography *QES webinar series* (17 March)

- Quantiles of the marginal and conditional dose-response relation based on weighted mixed-effects models (24 March)

Cochrane Starter Pack

TaskExchange - Use your skills to help authors complete reviews

Cochrane Crowd - Volunteer to help categorise and summarise healthcare evidence

Online learning - Resources relevant to systematic reviews and evidence-based medicine

Interactive Learning (Cochrane account required) - how to conduct a systematic review

Evidence Essentials (free but Cochrane account required) - introduction to health evidence

Learning events - find information about upcoming training (in-person and online)

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