The San Francisco Cochrane Center was launched soon thereafter, in 1996, with Lisa Bero and Drummond Rennie as Co-Directors.
The Providence office became the first point of contact for the work of The Cochrane Collaboration in the United States and assumed responsibility for fulfilling the core Center functions.
The USCC main office in Baltimore was responsible for providing training and support for review authors, trials search coordinators (TSCs), review group coordinators (RGCs), editors, handsearchers, consumers, healthcare providers, policy makers, and others.
In late 1992, work began on development of a register of reports of controlled trials for use in conducting systematic reviews.
The first meeting was held and the eligibility criteria were decided at the Cochrane Workshop on “Building a Register of RCTs” at Green College, Oxford, United Kingdom, November 8, 1992 and was attended by Iain Chalmers, Carol Lefebrvre and Kay Dickersin, among others.
[2] Although the individuals interested in and key to the developments leading to international registers of randomized controlled trials were also leaders in the Cochrane Collaboration,[3] a larger and more centralized group was felt to be a better location for a common resource.
[4] One of the outcomes of that meeting was an agreement by National Library of Medicine to retag existing MEDLINE records of reports of RCTs and CCTs, identified by Cochrane collaborators and not already tagged as such, with the publication types (PTs) RANDOMIZED-CONTROLLED-TRIAL (RCT[PT]) and CONTROLLED-CLINICAL-TRIAL (CCT[PT]).
CENTRAL was then created using two sources of information about published trial reports, periodic download of all records in MEDLINE tagged as RCT|PT and CCT|PT and submission of non-MEDLINE eligible citations (e.g., conference abstracts identified through handsearching) by the centers and review groups.
For the 1994-2005 time period, CENTRAL was funded mainly by the National Library of Medicine, and also by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, The Packard Foundation, and the European Union Biomedical and Health Research Programmes I and II.