August 18, 2026
If you want to know whichrestaurant in town is actually good, you can read the ads, or you can watchwhere the chefs eat on their night off.
Evidence synthesis has anequivalent: Cochrane Reviews. The Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews iswidely regarded as the methodological gold standard in health research.Cochrane authors work under some of the strictest editorial oversight in science.Their methods sections are examined line by line. And, importantly for ourpurposes, Cochrane does not tell its authors which screening tool to use. Theychoose for themselves.
What they choose
A full-text search of theCochrane Library in May 2026 finds 68 Cochrane Reviews citing Rayyan. The nextidentified screening tool appears in 21. Others we checked appear in none.
That is more than a three-to-onemargin, in the one corner of the field where you would most expect inertia tofavor older, longer-established tools. It did not.
Why this signal is hard tofake
Marketing can inflate a lot ofnumbers. It cannot write a Cochrane methods section. When a Cochrane authornames Rayyan, it means the tool passed the judgment of the most experiencedsystematic reviewers in the world, and then passed editorial review on top ofthat. Sixty-eight times.
This is also a measure you canverify in about two minutes: go to the Cochrane Library, search each tool'sname in full text, and filter to Cochrane Reviews. We publish our search methodbecause we want you to run it.
What it means for your team
Most review teams are notwriting Cochrane Reviews. But every review team benefits from using theworkflow that Cochrane-grade authors have stress-tested: blind screeningbetween reviewers, conflict resolution, clear audit trails, and AI assistancethat supports human judgment instead of replacing it.
If it holds up under Cochranescrutiny, it will hold up in your department. The full evidence record is atrayyan.ai/impact, and you can read what ten years of PROSPERO registrationsshow in the first post in this series.
