Cochrane Corners in JMNI.

JMNI announces a new collaboration with the Cochrane Rehabilitation, a new field within Cochrane. The outline of this collaboration will include commentaries on selected Cochrane Reviews that are of interest to the readers of JMNI, in a new section called ‘Cochrane Corner’.

Since its beginning, JMNI has set the goal to contribute to the field of the interactions between the musculoskeletal and neuronal system, a fact that has been evidenced for the past 18 years by publishing a great number of clinical and experimental studies and review articles by prominent authors.

From this issue and forth, the cooperation between JMNI and Cochrane Rehabilitation gives the opportunity to readers of the Journal to get updated by high quality extended Cochrane Systematic Reviews published in Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews that will be presented in the form of summaries with commentaries on the Cochrane reviews’ key messages as well as implications of the Cochrane evidence for clinical practice. We believe that these commentaries stemming from experts on the field will be of great assistance to the researchers as well as to the clinicians who deal with musculoskeletal disorders considering the clash cooperation of biomechanical, biological and neuronal interactions.

Cochrane Rehabilitation

Rehabilitation is a cross-sectional field of competence that includes different health conditions of interest to many Cochrane Review Groups. Consequently, rehabilitation is considered by Cochrane as a Field, a term used for groups that focus on health issues and/or interventions of importance to specific populations[1]. The aim of Cochrane Rehabilitation is to be a bridge between Cochrane and rehabilitation stakeholders. The mission is to systematically identify and disseminate evidence from Cochrane to rehabilitation providers, policy makers, and patients and to improve the quality, quantity and relevance of Cochrane’s evidence from a rehabilitation perspective[2,3].

Cochrane Rehabilitation (rehabilitation.cochrane.org/) is dedicated to improving the evidence-based clinical practice of all rehabilitation professionals[4]. One of the main functions of Cochrane Rehabilitation is to contribute to Cochrane knowledge translation (KT) strategy[5,6]. In line with one of the main tasks of the Cochrane KT strategy[5], Cochrane Rehabilitation attempted the Cochrane Corner initiative in scientific journals. The aim of this initiative is to disseminate Cochrane evidence to a broader audience, to increase the awareness of the evidence, and to make it accessible to all the users for facilitating its implementation.

Cochrane Systematic Reviews and Cochrane Corners

Cochrane Systematic Reviews (CSRs) are recognized as the actual gold standard in terms of systematic reviews and of the methodology used to perform them. The quality of evidence evaluation is a key point for the decision-making and for the applicability of systematic reviews findings to daily clinical practice.

Cochrane Corners represent a KT tool to present the contents of Cochrane Systematic Reviews[7]. One Cochrane Corner contains the summary of one review with comments contextualized to the clinical field relevant for the journal. In terms of KT Action Cycle[8], it can be associated with adapting knowledge to the context of use and facilitating its use which will inform knowledge from a specific professional perspective, i.e. rehabilitation in this case[4]. The Publication Committee within Cochrane Rehabilitation undertook the task of the establishment of Cochrane Corners working in collaboration with other committees[1]. The content of Cochrane Corners produced by Cochrane Rehabilitation will include summaries of CSRs highlighting their content, while not simply repeating the contents. They constitute the original work of the author(s) (Cochrane Rehabilitation community members and rehabilitation professionals), containing the author(s)’ specific ideas and comments related to the review including relevance to and implications for clinical rehabilitation as well as for policies regarding rehabilitation. They are anyhow reviewed and accepted not only by Cochrane Rehabilitation but also by the Cochrane Review Group that published the original review. Cochrane Corners will have a bridging function between rehabilitation relevant Cochrane Reviews provided by Cochrane Library and the end-users.