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Emergency medicine
Protocol
Quality of reporting in abstracts of RCTs published in emergency medicine journals: a protocol for a systematic survey of the literature
  1. Federico Germini1,2,
  2. Maura Marcucci3,4,
  3. Marta Fedele5,
  4. Maria Giulia Galli6,
  5. Lawrence Mbuagbaw7,8,
  6. Valentina Salvatori9,
  7. Giacomo Veronese10,
  8. Andrew Worster11,
  9. Lehana Thabane7,8,12,13,14
  1. 1 Department of Emergency, Fondazione IRCCS Ca’ Granda – Ospedale Maggiore Policlinico, Milano, Italy
  2. 2 Department of Health Sciences, Università degli Studi di Milano, Milano, Italy
  3. 3 Geriatric Unit, Fondazione IRCCS Ca’ Granda – Ospedale Maggiore Policlinico, Milano, Italy
  4. 4 Department of Clinical Sciences and Community Health, Università degli Studi di Milano, Milano, Italy
  5. 5 Department of Emergency, Area Nord, Azienda Unita Sanitaria Locale di Bologna, Bologna, Italy
  6. 6 Department of Clinical and Experimental Medicine, Università degli Studi di Parma, Parma, Italy
  7. 7 Department of Health Research Methods, Evidence, and Impact, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
  8. 8 Biostatistics Unit, Father Sean O’Sullivan Research Centre, St Joseph’s Healthcare, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
  9. 9 General Practitioner Course, Regione Marche – Servizio Sanità, Ancona, Italy
  10. 10 Department of Emergency Medicine, Ospedale Niguarda Ca’ Granda, Milano, Italy
  11. 11 Division of Emergency Medicine, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
  12. 12 Departments of Paediatrics and Anaesthesia, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
  13. 13 Centre for Evaluation of Medicine, St Joseph’s Healthcare, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
  14. 14 Population Health Research Institute, Hamilton Health Sciences, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
  1. Correspondence to Dr. Lehana Thabane; thabanl{at}mcmaster.ca

Abstract

Introduction The quality of reporting of abstracts of randomised controlled trials (RCTs) in major general medical journals and in some category-specific journals was shown to be poor before the publication of the ConsolidatedStandards of ReportingTrials (CONSORT) extension for abstracts in 2008, and an improvement in the quality of reporting of abstracts was observed after its publication. The effect of the publication of the CONSORT extension for abstracts on the quality of reporting of RCTs in emergency medicine journals has not been studied. In this paper, we present the protocol of a systematic survey of the literature, aimed at assessing the quality of reporting in abstracts of RCTs published in emergency medicine journals and at evaluating the effect of the publication of the CONSORT extension for abstracts on the quality of reporting.

Methods and analysis The Medline database will be searched for RCTs published in the years 2005–2007 and 2014–2015 in the top 10 emergency medicine journals, according to their impact factor. Candidate studies will be screened for inclusion in the review. Exclusion criteria will be the following: the abstract is not available, they are published only as abstracts, still recruiting, or duplicate publications. The study outcomes will be the overall quality of reporting (number of items reported) according to the CONSORT extension and the compliance with its individual items. Two independent reviewers will screen each article for inclusion and will extract data on the CONSORT items and on other variables, which can possibly affect the quality of reporting.

Ethics and dissemination This is a library-based study and therefore exempt from research ethics board review. The review results will be disseminated through abstract submission to conferences and publication in a peer-reviewed biomedical journal.

  • Accident & emergency medicine
  • Statistics &research methods
  • Abstract
  • Quality of reporting
  • Research methodology

This is an Open Access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/

https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjopen-2016-014981

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    Footnotes

    • Contributors FG is the guarantor of the review. FG, MM, LM, AW and LT drafted the manuscript. FG, MF, MGG, MM, LM, VS, GV, AW and LT contributed to the development of the selection criteria, the risk of bias assessment strategy and data extraction criteria. FG developed the search strategy. MM, LM and LT provided statistical expertise. AW provided expertise on emergency medicine literature. LM and LT provided expertise on quality of reporting. FG, MF, MGG, MM, LM, VS, GV, AW and LT read, provided feedback and approved the final manuscript.

    • Competing interests None declared.

    • Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.