PEDro includes 564 Cochrane reviews, indicating that a tenth of all Cochrane reviews are either directly or indirectly relevant to physiotherapy practice. In The Cochrane Library, 254 of the Cochrane reviews (approximately 5%) are directly indexed as ‘Physical Therapy Modalities’. This is of learn more particular importance in supporting evidence-based physiotherapy, because Cochrane reviews relevant to physiotherapy have been demonstrated to be of higher quality than physiotherapy reviews published outside of The Cochrane Library. 1 These reviews provide reliable evidence to inform physiotherapy intervention

decisions and guide practice, and demonstrate the credentials of physiotherapy as a research active and informed profession. Further demonstrating the relevance of The Cochrane Library to physiotherapy, interventions delivered by physiotherapists selleck chemical or relevant to physiotherapy feature in 10 of the 20 most accessed reviews in The Cochrane Library, as presented in Table 1. In addition to systematic reviews, The Cochrane

Library includes CENTRAL, a database of randomised controlled trials and other studies eligible for inclusion in Cochrane reviews. These studies have been identified through the efforts of Cochrane’s many contributors and volunteers. Importantly, this database includes trials in languages other than English, or published in journals not indexed in MEDLINE, thereby facilitating access to studies that would otherwise be difficult to find. CENTRAL’s coverage of randomised trials of physiotherapy interventions is as good or better than other major bibliographic databases that index such trials. 2 and 3 As well as automatically including reports of randomised trials indexed in MEDLINE, Rolziracetam CENTRAL also contains many reports of trials that are unique to EMBASE. We estimate that at least 12 000 reports of trials of physiotherapy

interventions from MEDLINE and EMBASE are included in CENTRAL. Furthermore, the manual searching of journals and conference proceedings was commonplace in the early days of Cochrane and would often result in discovering reports of trials that would never otherwise be identified. For example, hand searching the Australian Journal of Physiotherapy (1955 to 2009) yielded over 250 trial reports, many of which were only reported as conference abstracts, but which are now available in CENTRAL. The influence of Cochrane on physiotherapy research and education in Australia is further demonstrated by the role of the Australian schools of physiotherapy in authoring Cochrane reviews and including the use of The Cochrane Library in their curricula. Of the 14 Australian schools of physiotherapy listed by the Australian Physiotherapy Council, at least 10 have members of staff who are authors of Cochrane reviews.