📙 Cochrane Reviews

Flinn aims to provide all "Cochrane Reviews" papers to customers in the most compliant and user-friendly way possible. To achieve this, Flinn has partnered directly with the Cochrane Library.

Data availability

• Coverage: Flinn covers Cochrane Reviews from 2014 onward. Cochrane reviews published before 2014 are not yet integrated into Flinn — to include earlier reviews, search them directly on cochranelibrary.com and import the results into Flinn via an RIS file.
• Data origin: literature data is obtained through the official John Wiley & Sons Corporation, holder of the Cochrane Library.
• Relevant official data fields: id, cochraneid, source, published_date, title, authors, affiliations, publication type, doi, journal, labels, abstract, summary, mesh headings, mesh words, languages, link, plain language summary.
• Accessibility: available 24/7. Flinn's storing and search system means you can still access the data through Flinn even when Cochrane itself is offline.
• Consistency: Flinn ensures daily data updates against the official Wiley data set, to reconcile any differences.

Search logic

Based on customer feedback, Flinn built a Cochrane-specific search engine aimed at higher-quality matches and better transparency, using exact-term logic.

1. • Search engine: built on Elasticsearch (Elasticsearch B.V.).
   • All data fields listed above are searchable.
   • Exact term matching by default — no truncation, no fuzziness, no wildcards — to maximize the relevancy of hits. You can still use wildcard or fuzzy operators yourself.
   • Default AND logic between words, to minimize false positives.
   • Date filtering: Flinn guarantees inclusive start-date and end-date selection.
   • Flexible Boolean search: supports operators such as OR, AND, NOT, (), *, ^, and more.

Flinn operators: We have developed and validated Flinn specific operators to support our customers:

Getting the same results in Flinn as in Cochrane

(Title/Abstract search)

Flinn's search is designed to be clear, transparent, and specific, giving you only relevant results with a high degree of traceability. If you need to reconcile result counts between Flinn and Cochrane directly, we've aligned the Title/Abstract search to yield the same number of results. To do so:

1. In Cochrane, search the Title OR Abstract fields in the advanced search manager, and disable search-word variations under search limits (this functionality expands the search to widely related terms and adds irrelevant results).
   
   
2. In Flinn, use the TITLE/ABSTRACT:(value) operator and put your search string inside the parentheses, always using an operator between each word to avoid unintended search behavior.

   Example: TITLE/ABSTRACT:(treatment AND during AND pregnancy)

    

Full-text availability

• Open Access papers: Flinn has partnered with MIRA.Digital GmbH to provide all Open Access papers and links for most paid articles.
• Full-text indexing: Flinn does not index the full text inside OA PDFs for search, to avoid mismatches with poor-quality data in journal names, bibliographies, affiliations, etc.

Deduplication with PubMed

Flinn offers validated, automated deduplication between PubMed and Cochrane results. Since about 99% of Cochrane content is also present on PubMed, this covers the vast majority of duplicates with minimal extra effort.