Completeness of Reporting Clinical Trial
Official title:
Evaluating the Impact of Assessing During Peer Review the CONSORT Checklist Submitted by Authors: a Randomised Controlled Trial
Randomised trials are considered the gold standard in medical research. The CONSORT (Consolidated Standards of Reporting Trials) Statement aims to improve the quality of reporting of randomised trials. Without transparent reporting, readers cannot judge the reliability and validity of trial findings, and therefore these findings cannot inform clinical practice. Different stakeholders, including biomedical journals, have taken different actions to try to improve author adherence to CONSORT. The most popular action among biomedical journals is to instruct authors to submit a completed RG checklist with page numbers indicating where the CONSORT items are addressed when they submit their manuscript. However, this measure alone has been proven not to be effective. In this study, the investigators intend to evaluate in a real editorial context whether assessing during peer review the consistency between the submitted CONSORT checklist and the information reported in the manuscripts of randomised trials, as well as to provide feedback to authors on the inconsistencies found, improves the completeness of reporting of published trials.
Randomised trials are considered the gold standard in medical research. The CONSORT
(Consolidated Standards of Reporting Trials) Statement aims to improve the quality of
reporting of randomised trials. Without transparent reporting, readers cannot judge the
reliability and validity of trial findings, and therefore these findings cannot inform
clinical practice.
In recent years, different stakeholders have acted to boost the completeness of reporting of
the published randomised trials, and therefore their transparency and reproducibility. In a
recently completed scoping review, the investigators identified and classified 31
interventions to improve adherence to reporting guidelines. This review revealed that it is
primarily journals that have taken most efforts to improve the completeness of reporting of
randomised trials - although most of their actions have been shown not to have the desired
effect.
One of the most popular strategies used by journals to improve adherence to CONSORT requires
authors to submit a populated checklist together with their manuscript indicating page
numbers corresponding to each item. However, journals usually lack further actions throughout
the editorial process to ensure that the corresponding information to each item is reported
in the randomised trial manuscript. This has been hypothesized to be one of the reasons why
this editorial strategy has not achieved optimal results.
In an effort to take full advantage of requiring the submission of populated checklists, the
investigators intend to evaluate in a real editorial context whether assessing during peer
review the consistency between the submitted CONSORT checklist and the information reported
in the manuscripts of randomised trials, as well as to provide feedback to authors on the
inconsistencies found, improves the completeness of reporting of published trials.
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