Quality of reporting of randomized controlled trials in ten academic Indian dental journals

Abstract

Background: Biased results from poorly reported trials can mislead decision-making in health care at all levels, from treatment decisions for the individual patient to formulation of national public health policies. Objective: To evaluate the quality of reporting of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) in ten Indian dental journals over the period 2011–2012. Materials and Methods: This study included all RCTs published as full-text articles reported in ten Indian dental journals over the period from 2011 to 2012. The relevant trials were identified by searching Medline. Hand searching of the journals was also carried out by three of the authors to check if any potential trial was missing. Each article was assessed against the Consolidated Standards of Reporting Trials criteria tool, as described by Schulz et al. (2010). Results: The mean number of criteria present per article was 12.2 (standard deviation [SD] =2.2) and only 5 of 106 articles got total possible score. Most of the articles (69%) did not mention about justification for sample size calculation, 89% of the articles did not mention about allocation concealment, 86% of the articles did not mention about funding and 63% of the articles did not mention about limitations of the study. Conclusion: The quality of reporting of Randomized clinical trials in ten Indian academic journals was poor.

Keywords

• Clinical trials
• Consolidated Standards of Reporting Trials statement
• Indian dental journals
• quality of reporting
• randomized controlled trials