Evaluating the Impact of Assessing During Peer Review the CONSORT Checklist Submitted by Authors

Summary

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.

Conditions

• Peer Review, Publishing
• Completeness of Reporting

Interventions

BEHAVIORAL

Evaluation of reporting inconsistencies

1. The completed CONSORT checklist submitted by authors of manuscripts randomised to the intervention group will be assessed by the lead investigator (DB) as to whether it is consistent with the information that was actually reported in the manuscript. This evaluation will be focused on 8 core CONSORT items. 2. DB will produce a standardised report containing precise requests for authors in order to improve the completeness of reporting of the items where reporting inconsistencies were found. This report will consist of a brief introduction followed by a point by point description of the inconsistencies found together with precise requests related to the information missing and examples extracted from CONSORT. DB will upload this report to the submission on the managing system of the journal (Scholar One) to make it accessible to the handling editor of the manuscript. 3. This editor will include the report in the letter to authors alongside the standard peer review reports.

BEHAVIORAL

Standard Peer Review.

Manuscripts will undergo the usual peer review process.

Sponsors & Collaborators

• University of Liverpool

  collaborator OTHER

• The BMJ

  collaborator OTHER

• Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya

  lead OTHER

Principal Investigators

• Sara Schroter · The BMJ, London

• Adrian Aldcroft · The BMJ, London

• David Moher · Ottawa Hospital Research Institute, Ottawa

• Isabelle Boutron · Paris Descartes University, Paris

• Jamie J Kirkham · University of Liverpool, Liverpool

• Erik Cobo · Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Barcelona

Study Design

Allocation

RANDOMIZED

Purpose

TREATMENT

Masking

DOUBLE

Model

PARALLEL

Eligibility

Sex

ALL

Healthy Volunteers

Yes

Timeline & Regulatory

Start

2018-12-07

Primary Completion

2019-04-13

Completion

2019-04-13

Countries

• United Kingdom

Study Locations