“Think not those faithful who praise all thy words and actions; but those who kindly reprove thy faults.”
 Socrates (469 BC–399 BC)

The SOCRATES Group were delighted with the response we received to the original series and with this in mind, a new group was formed to continue the assessment of the output of the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews (CDSR). Our aim is to bring summaries of relevant reviews of this evidence-based resource to our colleagues in emergency medicine.

The “fault” previously noted by our readers, was that by the time some of the articles appeared in print, there had been updates of the reviews published in the CDSR. We hope the new series will address this, and continue to provide the readers of the Emergency Medicine Journal with accurate synopses that are of particular relevance to those involved in the practice of emergency medicine. We propose to do this by submitting the synopses of the reviews as we continue to search the database for others that our colleagues might find useful.

Professor Matthew Cooke advised the SOCRATES Group that the National Library for Health’s (NLH) emergency care specialist library has now published an extensive clinical library of guidelines and with this an index of Cochrane reviews that were identified by the NLH as relevant to emergency medicine. The NLH group included an information scientist (Rachel Lancaster) and a clinical editor (Stewart Mc Morran) and the result of their work is accessible at www.library.nhs.uk/emergency.

The new SOCRATES working party is made up of some of the people from the original group and new members, all of whom are involved in the provision of frontline patient care. We believe this is our strength and it enables us to decide what is truly relevant to those working on the …