As part of Cochrane’s Linked Data project, we have been annotating our intervention reviews with population, intervention, comparison and outcome (PICO) metadata using the controlled vocabulary being developed by Cochrane for this purpose. The aim of this work is to make our research easier to find, share and reuse. 

We have made good progress: most of our reviews and protocols are now fully annotated at the methods level, and around 10-15% of the included studies have also been annotated with PICO data. The status of our annotation work, together with our process, was presented in a poster at the annual Cochrane Colloquium in Edinburgh.

The Cochrane Linked data team are now working on a prototype search tool which will work using the PICO metadata to improve search precision.