Qualitative research
Finding and appraising qualitative evidence
What does the Cochrane logo tell us?
< Back to search results- Format Videos
- Language/s English
- Target Audience Further education, Self-directed learning
- EBM Stage 2 - Finding the evidence, 3 - Appraising evidence
- Duration 5-15 mins
- Difficulty Intermediate
Key Concepts addressed
- 2-3g Statistical significance is not the same as importance
- 1-2f Consider all of the relevant fair comparisons
Details
This video and animated slide presentation prepared by Steven Woloshin shows how the Cochrane logo was developed, and what it tells us.
The presentation explains relative risks, confidence intervals, forest plots, and standard and cumulative meta-analyses.
Read on to watch the video or download the slides.
Watch the video
Systematic reviews are the best way to understand the effects of treatments because they consider all the relevant, reliable evidence.
This resource will be useful for teachers, lecturers or others who want to explain systematic reviews using clear and informative visuals.
You can watch the video (8 minutes 23 seconds) by clicking Lisa and Steve’s picture on the right. The video is in M4V format.
You can also download the slides (926 KB, PPT format).
Alfredo L. Fort 11:29am Mon 04 Feb 2013
Minor comment. The slides are great to show us how the forest plots work and the example of steroids and deaths exemplify well. However, towards the end it is unclear what the message is. Slide 8, for example (a repeat of the plot without any explanations) is cryptic. The final slide seems to say that over a decade there was sufficient evidence demonstrating the positive effect of steroids (which ends in the 80s, i.e., 30 years ago!), and another loose comment about whether another decade and 10 trials are needed to convince clinicians to change practice...Remember it's a PowerPoint presentation, so normally one elaborates over the slide. I think the take-home message would be more powerful if the author would add a few more explicit conclusions to the slide. Thanks.
09:47am Tue 05 Feb 2013
@ I think these are great suggestions, Alfredo. Our purpose in putting the slides up for now was to provide a resource that people could use in their own teaching as well as to inform themselves. But you are absolutely right, having the speakers' notes and/or a voiceover would be ideal.
Douglas_Badenoch 09:54am Mon 25 Mar 2013
@Douglas_Badenoch Hi Alfredo. Just to let you know that Steve has very kindly recorded a voice-over of the presentation and I have added it to the post above. Hopefully this addresses your question. Please let us know if it doesn't! cheers Douglas
Jim Elliott 17:43pm Fri 11 Jan 2019
I like the video and explanation of the Forest plot. Many years ago I co-wrote the original user guide for the first version of the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews. In that we devised a handy mnemonic for helping to work out whether the result shown on the Forest plot (which we referred to at the time as a "blobogram"!). With the primary outcome in mind (i.e. death for the corticosteroids example) the odds ratio is on the Left (of the line of no effect) when there is Less of the outcome (which for a bad outcome is obviously better) and on the Right when there is moRe of the outcome: Left = Less and Right = moRe (of the outcome). I have always found that helpful and people we taught at the time did too.
douglas 09:10am Mon 28 Jan 2019
@douglas Good to hear from you Jim, and thanks for sharing. I remember being taught moRe = Right, Less= Left at a CASP workshop way back in the 90s, no doubt thanks to your legacy! I've always found it helpful, especially when dealing with beneficial outcomes (when it's a good thing to have the point estimates to the right of the line-of-no-difference) rather than harmful ones (when you want them to be on the left).