Original ArticleThe quality of reporting of trial abstracts is suboptimal: Survey of major general medical journals
Section snippets
1 Introduction
Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) represent the reference standard to estimate the benefits and harms of preventive and therapeutic interventions [1]. Health care professionals, systematic reviewers, and guideline developers need to critically appraise RCTs to determine their methodological quality (using criteria, such as allocation concealment, blinding, intention-to-treat analysis) and the importance of the results (estimates of benefit and harm, and their precision) [2], [3], [4], [5].
2.1 Design
We conducted a systematic survey of RCT abstracts published in four major medical journals: The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), The Lancet, Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), and British Medical Journal (BMJ) in the year 2006.
2.2 Eligibility
We included abstracts of RCTs of preventive or therapeutic interventions. We excluded abstracts of other study designs, including observational studies, quasi-randomized trials, economic analyses based on RCTs, editorials, and letters. We also
3 Results
Our search strategy yielded 256 abstracts, from which 29 were excluded (11 observational studies based on RCT data, eight cluster RCTs, three economic analysis, three RCTs of diagnostic tests, three letters, and one quasi-randomized study), as presented in Fig. 1. From the 227 included abstracts, 98.6% presented the results of superiority trials and 1.3% were crossover studies.
4 Discussion
In this systematic survey, we found that all abstracts published in four prominent general medical journals in 2006 were structured (as expected, because it is a formal requirement for all four journals), and almost all identified the study as an RCT, specified the study population, objectives, and trial interventions. On the other hand, methodological quality reporting was insufficient; only one abstract reported on allocation concealment, and a small proportion accurately reported on blinding
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