The Portuguese Journal of Cardiology and the Center for Evidence-Based Medicine (CEMBE) of Lisbon University School of Medicine have collaborated for several years to produce the section entitled Evidence-Based Cardiology. This section of the Journal has published numerous papers, including systematic reviews, articles on methodology and original studies on evidence-based cardiology, with considerable success and well received by our readers. The series on methodological principles, published in the early 2000s, was particularly successful, and led to the publication of a book sponsored by the Portuguese Society of Cardiology containing most of the papers in the series. This success was not limited to Portugal, as shown by the citation of one of our papers in a letter to the New England Journal of Medicine (Jaber BL, Madias NE, New Engl J Med 2005;353:1859), which to our knowledge was the first time that an article published in a Portuguese journal had been cited in this prestigious publication.

The CEMBE recently had the honor of being invited by the Cochrane Collaboration (CC) to establish a Portuguese Collaborating Center of the Iberoamerican Cochrane Network. For those readers who are less familiar with the CC, this unique institution is an international network of more than 28000 collaborators in over 100 countries, the main purpose of which is to help healthcare practitioners, policy-makers, patients, their advocates and carers, make well-informed decisions about health care, by preparing, updating, and promoting the accessibility of systematic reviews of primary research (the Cochrane Reviews). The CC is recognized worldwide as a reliable source of high-quality information on the effectiveness of health interventions.

The establishment of a Collaborating Center within the CEMBE has led to a natural development in the collaboration between the CEMBE and the Journal, which is intending to publish a three-monthly section named the Cochrane Corner, consisting of a recent Cochrane Review considered by the head and the Scientific Coordinator of the Center (myself and Prof. João Costa, respectively) to be particularly relevant, together with a brief comment on the importance of this review and its potential application in cardiological practice.

The Editor of the Journal, Prof. Fausto Pinto, and I hope that our readers will find the new section useful and that they will continue to send us their comments and suggestions.

Finally, I thank Prof. Fausto Pinto for his ongoing support in the collaboration between the CEMBE and the Journal, to which is now added the Cochrane Collaborating Center.