Reply to: quality of evidence in Cochrane systematic reviews in anaesthesia, critical care and emergency medicine

We would like to thank Smith and colleagues for their critique1 of our analysis of the quality of evidence reported in systematic reviews published by the Cochrane Anaesthesia, Critical Care and Emergency medicine review group.2 The cut-off date was simply when data collection commenced for this study. It is true that a higher proportion of reviews would have used GRADE (Grades of Recommendation, Assessment, Development and Evaluation) if a more up to date sample was used for our analysis. However, a substantial number of reviews in the sample we analysed did use GRADE..