Measuring the Performance of the Cochrane Library

How well does The Cochrane Library achieve its objectiveto provide accessible and credible evidence to guide decision making in medicine and public health?And how should we measure success or failure?Regular users of The Cochrane Library will have a view of its quality, and we hope that you think that it's good and improving.One of our tasks as the Cochrane Library Oversight Committee (CLOC) is to report to the Steering Group of The Cochrane Collaboration on the performance of the Library and its Editor in Chief.1 In general we are satisfied with both.But we thought it important to try to introduce some objectivity into the evaluation of The Cochrane Library by devising a set of metrics.Together with the Cochrane Editorial Unit we have done so, and they are shown in Table 1 along with their values for the past three years.We welcome your feedback on the metrics we have devised.To be useful, metrics must provide information on progress in relation to the aims of the Library.In addition, it must be possible to measure them precisely and relatively easily.They must also change over time at a speed that is useful-not as fast as hourly but not as slowly as five yearly.