The first issue of Bandolier, an independent journal about evidence-based healthcare, written by Oxford scientists, (RAM AND HJM) was printed in February 1994. It has appeared monthly ever since and has become the premier source of evidence based healthcare information in the UK and worldwide for both healthcare professionals and consumers.

The award winning electronic version of Bandolier (www.ebandolier.com) now has over one million visitors each month from all over the world. Whilst many visitors are healthcare professionals, Bandolier is also a source of high quality information for many patients and their carers, as well as for organisations that commission and pay for healthcare.

The impetus behind Bandolier was to find information about evidence of effectiveness (or lack of it), and put the results forward as simple bullet points of those things that worked and those that did not: a bandolier with bullets. Information comes from systematic reviews, meta-analyses, randomised trials, and from high quality observational studies.

Each month PubMed and the Cochrane Library are searched for systematic reviews and meta-analyses published in the recent past.

For other web content (such as the specialist resource areas) we search over all times, and where necessary, do systematic reviews ourselves. Other types of information, like large epidemiological studies, may be included if they shed important light on a topic.