Contact details (i.e. name, address, e-mail, telephone and fax number) for the person to whom correspondence about the review should be addressed, and who has agreed to take responsibility for maintaining and developing the review, are automatically taken from ‘Archie’, the web interface of The Cochrane Collaboration’s Information Management System (IMS). This person usually takes responsibility for developing and organising the review, communicates with the editorial base, ensures that the review is prepared within agreed timescales, submits it to the editorial base, communicates feedback to co-authors and ensures that the updates are prepared.
The contact author does not need to be the first author, and the choice of contact author will not affect the citation for the review. If the contact author no longer wishes to be responsible for a published review and another member of the review team does not wish to take responsibility for it, then the Review Group Co-ordinator (RGC) should be listed as the contact author, and the former contact author listed as a co-author. The RGC need not be listed as a co-author.