Crowdsourcing and COVID-19: a case study of Cochrane Crowd

Abstract

Cochrane has used crowdsourcing effectively to identify health evidence since 2014. To date, over 175,000 trialshave been identified for Cochrane’s Central Register of Controlled Trials via Cochrane Crowd (https://crowd.cochrane.org), Cochrane’s citizen science platform, engaging a Crowd of over 20,000 people from 166 countries. The COVID-19 pandemic presented the evidence synthesis community with the enormous challenge of keeping up with the exponential output of COVID-19 research. This case study will detail the new tasks we developed to aid the production of COVID-19 rapid reviews and supply the Cochrane COVID-19 study register. The pandemic initially looked set to disrupt the Crowd team’s plans for 2020 but has in fact served to further our understanding of the potential role crowdsourcing can play in the health evidence ecosystem.

Crowdsourcing the identification of studies for COVID‐19‐related Cochrane Rapid Reviews

“…treatment and management, or diagnostic, etc.). They must pass the COVID Quest training module by 80% or more to gain access to the live task 19 . Once each rapid review crowd task had been built, contributors who had assessed at least one record in COVID Quest within the last month were contacted by email to inform them that they were eligible to participate in these Rapid Review tasks.…”

“…2 Many questions have arisen regarding mechanism, transmission, diagnosis, prognosis, treatment and management of COVID-19. In response to this global crisis, Cochrane launched a Rapid Review initiative (https:// www.cochrane.org/cochranes-work-rapid-reviews-responsecovid- 19). Rapid Reviews are needed urgently to assess and appraise both existing actionable literature (on areas such as transmission mitigation, oxygen therapy, respiratory failure, and others) and to assess and appraise the exponentially growing corpus of research being produced as a direct result of COVID-19.…”