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Chapter 3: Maintaining reviews: updates, amendments and feedback

Authors: Julian PT Higgins, Sally Green and Rob JPM Scholten.

Key points

Systematic reviews that are not maintained may become out of date or misleading.
The Cochrane Collaboration policy is that Cochrane Intervention reviews should either be updated within two years or include a commentary to explain why this is not the case.
Any change to a Cochrane review is either an update or an amendment. Updates involve a search for new studies, any other change is an amendment.
Cochrane reviews have a citation version. This chapter includes a list of criteria for determining when a new citation version is appropriate.
In addition to a search for new studies, updating a Cochrane review may involve revision of the review question and incorporation of new methods.
Feedback on Cochrane reviews informs the updating and maintaining process.
The ‘Date review assessed as up to date’ is entered by review authors and is published at the beginning of a review. The criteria for assessing a review as up to date are given in this chapter.