Enable Risk of Bias 2


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IMPORTANT NOTICE

Start by reading the information on Risk of Bias 2 (RoB 2) available from Cochrane Methods.

Please note the following important points:

  • The setup for RoB 2 is not customizable. 
  • If a review does not have any included studies, the RoB 2 integration should not be enabled, otherwise it will show an empty RoB table when published.
  • If you are working with a Cochrane Review Group, you may wish to share your completed risk of bias assessments in the RoB 2 Excel tool with your group for checking, before you enter the RoB 2 assessments into RevMan.
  • Covidence is not currently set up to make ROB 2 assessments.

Cochrane authors and Cochrane group staff can also submit RoB 2 questions to the monthly Methods Support Unit Web Clinic for discussion – read more and submit questions here.

Considerations before enabling Risk of Bias 2

  • For review updates that have switched to RoB 2 from RoB 1, all risk of bias data from the previous version will be lost when RoB 2 is enabled. If authors need to download or make a copy, ensure they do it before RoB 2 is enabled. 
  • Once the RoB 2 feature is enabled, it is not possible to disable it except to revert to a version of the review prior to enabling of the features. However, when reverting to a version prior to enabling RoB 2, RoB 1 data will not be recovered.
  • Authors can request that Cochrane Support enable this feature; more information about enabling RoB 2 available here.

RoB 2 tables and figures:

In most circumstances, authors do not need to create any RoB 2 tables or figures outside of RevMan. We recommend authors visualise RoB 2 data in a Cochrane Review by:

Both of these are created in RevMan.


Enable RoB 2 

Request your Managing Editor or Cochrane Support to enable RoB 2 functionality. We advise that this is after you have input your results data and have completed your risk of bias assessments using the tools developed to manage the process (see the Tools section in the RoB 2 Cochrane Review Starter Pack – available via Cochrane Methods).

To check that your review is set up for using RoB 2, go to Included studies, click on 'Actions' then click on the 'Risk of Bias Setup' from the 'Actions' menu.


Note the domains of the RoB 2 tool

The domains will now include the ones covered by the RoB 2 tool. Note that the first domain (Bias arising from the randomization process) is study-level, while all others are outcome-level. Also, note that all the domains are fixed and you cannot edit them, which is different from the RoB 1 tool.

ROBINS-I is not integrated into RevMan, ROBINS-I would need to be included in an additional table and figures created using the ROBINS-I data visualisation tool, not the ROB 2 tool.