The transplant library of randomized controlled trials and systematic reviews

In 1978, the renowned Archie Cochrane in an essay on the future of medicine said “It is surely a great criticism of our profession that we have not organized a critical summary, by specialty or subspecialty, adapted periodically, of all relevant randomized controlled trials.” This did of course eventually result in the creation of the Cochrane collaboration and the Cochrane library of randomized controlled trial (RCT), but this is large (more than half a million references), it is not organized by specialty, and one does need some more sophisticated search skills to get what you want. Thus, the Transplant Library, where minimal search skills are required, is the first such specialized library that Cochrane identified as being a necessity some 40 yr ago.

In the Transplant Library, all the work has been performed for you in that the trials are classified by the organ concerned, and furthermore, it includes references from conference proceedings to RCTs, which are not available in Medline.

The Transplant Library contains some 7500 references to RCTs and includes more than 3500 references to abstracts of RCTs in conference proceedings, many of which do not ever come to be published.

Another aspect of the Library is that from January 2004 all trials are graded for the quality of the methodology using allocation concealment, intention to treat analysis, and the Jadad score, which takes into account appropriate methods of randomization, blinding, and follow-up. From January 2008, selected good quality systematic reviews and meta-analyses have also been added to the Library.

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In the following pages, there is a guide to the use of the Library, and we hope you will find this useful. Please contact us if you have any questions.