Key points are not available for this paper at this time.
The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) produces clinical guidelines for the National Health Service (NHS) in England and Wales.These guidelines are developed by groups that combine people with expertise in conducting systematic reviews and health economic analyses, with those with expertise in the clinical area (from healthcare professionals and patients).During guideline development, the group poses about 20 to 25 clinical questions, which are then addressed by systematic reviews.As described in the NICE Guidelines Manual,1 groups routinely search for existing relevant systematic reviews.The NHS funds NICE and makes substantial contributions to The Cochrane Collaboration, so there is a common interest in making the best use of Cochrane Reviews for informing guidelines.One way of assessing the extent to which systematic reviews are used in guidelines is to look at the number of citations of reviews in each guideline.In a recent piece of work, we aimed to find out the extent of citation of Cochrane Reviews in NICE guidelines. The use of Cochrane Reviews in NICE clinical guidelines (Editorial)1
Alderson et al. (Tue,) studied this question.