RevMan 5 pilot

The RevMan 5 Pilot started on 10 December 2007. The pilot CRGs will use the Release Candidate version of RevMan 5 to process and mark for publication new and amended intervention and methodology reviews during the three months leading up to the February 2008 quarterly module submission. Pilot CRGs will not be able to publish Diagnostic Test Accuracy (DTA) reviews or Overviews of reviews for publication during the pilot period.

On successful completion of the pilot, RevMan 5 will go on general release and the nine-month transition period will begin.

Objectives of pilot

1. To identify problems with the everyday use and publication of reviews through RevMan 5 and new supporting functionality in Archie.
2. To provide IMS Support with three months’ hands-on experience before supporting other CRG editorial base staff during the transition period and beyond.

Detailed plans

This document describes how the RevMan 5 pilot will be managed:

• RevMan_5_Pilot_Strategy.pdf .

Letter to pilot authors

• Pilot-authors-letter.pdf - the announcement sent to authors in the pilot groups.

When do Pilot authors need access to Archie?

Authors who are not the contact person for a review

Authors should request an Archie user account during the Pilot phase (December-February) if they intend to check out their review(s) from Archie to work on over the next couple of months and/or to convert their currently published protocol or review to RevMan 5 for inclusion in the February 2008 module submission. For authors are not the contact person for a review, therefore, it is very important that they speak to the contact person for their review(s) first before requesting a user account so that they can discuss the review team's strategy for converting the review. In other words, authors need to decide if their review team intend to convert the review themselves and, if so, who will be doing this., or do they intend as a team to continue to use RevMan 4 during the pilot phase. This is because once somebody checks a review out to RevMan 5, it will be converted and it cannot revert to RevMan 4. At this point all members of the review team will have to move to RevMan 5.

Authors of reviews in the editorial process

As part of the editorial processing of reviews which have already been submitted to the Pilot CRGs for editorial approval, the editorial base of your CRG will automatically convert these reviews to RevMan 5. When they are ready to release the review back to the authors so that they can revise it in response to referee and/or editorial feedback, the editorial team will inform the contact person for the review and, at the same time, initiate the registration process for the contact person, if necessary, so that the contact person can check the review out of Archie. At that point the editorial team will also ask the contact author if the review team are also ready to have Archie user accounts. If authors currently have a draft in the editorial process, they can prepare for the next step by installing RevMan 5 and working through the RevMan 5 tutorial.

Producing Summary of findings tables in GRADEprofiler

An additional piece of software, GRADEprofiler, will be available to assist review authors in the preparation of ‘Summary of findings’ tables. The final version of the software will be launched in March 2008 at the same time as RevMan 5. Users of platforms other than Windows will have to prepare the SoF table directly in RevMan 5.

GRADEprofiler is able to retrieve data from RevMan 5 and to combine this with user-entered control group risks to produce the relative effects and absolute risks associated with interventions. In addition, it leads the user through the process of a GRADE assessment, and produces a table that can be readily imported into RevMan as a SoF table. The table is imported as a special table and cannot be modified in RevMan.

RevMan 5 Pilot authors who would like to try GRADEprofiler during the Pilot phase can follow this link: www.gradeworkinggroup.org/members/balance.htm. For information about training and support, see: www.gradeworkinggroup.org/news.htm.

For more information about how to prepare a Summary of Findings table, please access the draft chapter ‘Presenting results and ‘Summary of findings’ tables’ from the Cochrane Handbook for Systematic Reviews of Interventions: www.cochrane.org/resources/handbook/Handbook5_Presenting_V6.pdf.