BACKGROUND: An overwhelming body of evidence stating that the completeness of reporting of randomised controlled trials (RCTs) is not optimal has accrued over time. In the mid-1990s, in response to these concerns, an international group of clinical trialists, statisticians, epidemiologists, and biomedical journal editors developed the CONsolidated Standards Of Reporting Trials (CONSORT) Statement. The CONSORT Statement, most recently updated in March 2010, is an evidence-based minimum ...

BACKGROUND: Economic evaluations of health interventions pose a particular challenge for reporting because substantial information must be conveyed to allow scrutiny of study findings. Despite a growth in published reports, existing reporting guidelines are not widely adopted. There is also a need to consolidate and update existing guidelines and promote their use in a user-friendly manner. A checklist is one way to help authors, editors, and peer reviewers use guidelines to improve ...

BACKGROUND: The CONSORT Statement is a reporting guideline for authors when reporting randomized controlled trials (RCTs). It offers a standard way for authors to prepare RCT reports. It has been endorsed by many high-impact medical journals and by international editorial groups. This study was conducted to assess the endorsement of the CONSORT Statement by high-impact medical journals in China by reviewing their instructions for authors.

METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: A total of 200 ...

BACKGROUND: The design of randomised controlled trials (RCTs) should incorporate characteristics (such as concealment of randomised allocation and blinding of participants and personnel) that avoid biases resulting from lack of comparability of the intervention and control groups. Empirical evidence suggests that the absence of such characteristics leads to biased intervention effect estimates, but the findings of different studies are not consistent.

OBJECTIVES: To examine the influence ...

BACKGROUND: The CONSORT Statement provides recommendations for reporting randomized controlled trials. We assessed the extent to which leading medical journals that publish reports of randomized trials incorporate the CONSORT recommendations into their journal and editorial processes.

METHODS: This article reports on two observational studies. Study 1: We examined the online version of 'Instructions to Authors' for 165 high impact factor medical journals and extracted all text mentioning ...

OBJECTIVE: To assemble a large dataset of language restricted and language inclusive systematic reviews, including both conventional medicinal (CM) and complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) interventions. To then assess the quality of these reports by considering and comparing different types of systematic reviews and their associated RCTs; CM and CAM interventions; the effect of language restrictions compared with language inclusions, and whether these results are influenced by ...

OBJECTIVE: To assess whether the completeness of reporting of health research is related to journals' endorsement of reporting guidelines.

DESIGN: Systematic review.

DATA SOURCES: Reporting guidelines from a published systematic review and the EQUATOR Network (October 2011). Studies assessing the completeness of reporting by using an included reporting guideline (termed "evaluations") (1990 to October 2011; addendum searches in January 2012) from searches of either Medline, Embase, and ...

BACKGROUND: Lately, the number of systematic reviews published has increased substantially. Many systematic reviews exclude trials published in languages other than English. However, there is little empirical evidence to support this action. We looked for differences in the completeness of reporting between trials published in other languages and those published in English, to see whether the exclusion of trials published in other languages is justified.

METHODS: We compared completeness ...

OBJECTIVE: To examine the safety, effectiveness, and cost effectiveness of long acting insulin for type 1 diabetes.

DESIGN: Systematic review and network meta-analysis.

DATA SOURCES: Medline, Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials, Embase, and grey literature were searched through January 2013.

STUDY SELECTION: Randomized controlled trials or non-randomized studies of long acting (glargine, detemir) and intermediate acting (neutral protamine Hagedorn (NPH), lente) insulin for ...

STUDY OBJECTIVES: To determine whether sedation with propofol would lead to shorter times to tracheal extubation and ICU length of stay than sedation with midazolam.

DESIGN: Multicenter, randomized, open label.

SETTING: Four academic tertiary-care ICUs in Canada.

PATIENTS: Critically ill patients requiring continuous sedation while receiving mechanical ventilation.

INTERVENTIONS: Random allocation by predicted requirement for mechanical ventilation (short sedation stratum, < 24 h; medium ...

BACKGROUND: Clear, transparent, and sufficiently detailed abstracts of conferences and journal articles related to randomized controlled trials (RCTs) are important, because readers often base their assessment of a trial solely on information in the abstract. Here, we extend the CONSORT (Consolidated Standards of Reporting Trials) Statement to develop a minimum list of essential items, which authors should consider when reporting the results of a RCT in any journal or conference ...

OBJECTIVES: Debate continues with respect to a "watch and wait" approach versus immediate antibiotic treatment for the initial treatment of acute otitis media. In this double-blind noninferiority trial, we compared clinical improvement rates at 14 days for children (6 months to 5 years of age) with acute otitis media who were randomly assigned to receive amoxicillin or placebo.

METHODS: We enrolled healthy children who presented to clinics or the emergency department with a new episode ...

OBJECTIVES: To assess the effects of folic acid and folinic acid in reducing the mucosal and gastrointestinal (GI) and haematologic side effects of low-dose of Methotrexate (MTX) in patients with Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA) and to determine whether or not folate supplementation alters MTX efficacy.

SEARCH STRATEGY: We searched the Cochrane Controlled Clinical Trial's Register (CCTR), the Cochrane Musculoskeletal Group Specialized Register and Medline up to and including June 1999, using ...

Importance: Systematic reviews of diagnostic test accuracy synthesize data from primary diagnostic studies that have evaluated the accuracy of 1 or more index tests against a reference standard, provide estimates of test performance, allow comparisons of the accuracy of different tests, and facilitate the identification of sources of variability in test accuracy.

Objective: To develop the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) diagnostic test accuracy ...