Cochrane systematic reviews aim to synthesize all available evidence on a health care intervention in order to provide high-quality, unbiased information to patients, providers, policymakers or other decision makers. A unique feature of a Cochrane Review is a ‘Summary of Findings’ table. It is a succinct and transparent summary of the magnitude of the effect size and quality of the evidence for each important outcome. The outcomes chosen for presentation in the Summary of Findings table should be ones that are important to patients and demonstrate a balance of benefit and harm. Pain is a key outcome in studies of interventions designed to improve symptoms of chronic musculoskeletal conditions. We found that in a sample of Cochrane reviews on chronic musculoskeletal conditions, both individual intervention studies and the systematic reviews of these studies report various domains of pain and outcome instruments for measuring those domains. The methods of analysis, thresholds for minimally important and clinically important differences, and presentation format also differed. These differences provide a challenge in both synthesizing the evidence in meta-analyses within systematic reviews and ensuring comparability of results across different systematic reviews. As OMERACT stated in 1993, clinical trials are “only as credible as their endpoints”. Thus, it is imperative that valid, responsive, and feasible outcome measures are utilized in intervention studies. Use of a standardized core set of outcomes in every trial will help ensure comparability across studies. There are various international organizations with expertise in outcome measures methodology. Our survey and interviews of individuals representing these organizations, as well as patients, health care providers, and methodologists, identified four themes: (1) Pain Domains, (2) Clinimetric considerations, (3) Thresholds for presenting results, and (4) Establishing hierarchies of outcomes. Early buy-in from this wide group of stakeholders and eliciting their opinions on key methodological issues will help strengthen the partnerships needed to achieve consensus on best practices for reporting pain outcomes in Cochrane Summary of Findings tables.