Starting and maintaining a new Collaborative Review Group: the Cochrane Collaborative Review Group on HIV Infection and AIDS

George W. Rutherford, M.D. Coordinating Editor
Gail E. Kennedy, M.P.H. Coordinator
Cochrane Collaborative Review Group on HIV Infection and AIDS University of California, San Francisco

OBJECTIVE OF WORKSHOP:

To review our experience with designing and funding a new collaborative review group and make suggestions for new collaborative review groups which have not yet been registered.

CONTENT:

The Cochrane Collaborative Review Group on HIV Infection and AIDS is a newly registered review group within the Cochrane Collaboration. Based at the University of California, San Francisco, the CRG on HIV Infection and AIDS was successfully registered and initially funded within 12 months of the pre-exploratory meeting. Our group is conducting systematic reviews in four areas -- behavioral, social and policy prevention interventions; biomedical prevention interventions; clinical, diagnosis and prognosis; and health services organization and delivery. We are organized around the four areas of systematic reviews and have identified at least one editor for each area; for areas in which we anticipate a large volume of reviews, we have designated more than one editor. A unique aspect of the CRG is that there were pre-existing groups who had other completed or had on-going meta analyses of HIV prevention and treatment trials. A special project of the group is the identification of hand searchers from Latin American, African and Asian countries with an eye to hand searching local general and specialty medical and public health journals for the Cochrane Collaboration. We shall discuss (1) our pre-exploratory and exploratory meeting process, (2) incorporation of pre-existing meta-analysis groups, (3) developing an organizational structure for the CRG with special emphasis on topic-specific subgroups with their own editors, (4) funding challenges for new groups and especially those based in the United States and (5) our efforts to include investigators from Latin America, Africa and Asia.