Balliol College, University of Oxford and Department of Plastic Surgery, Guy's and St. Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust, London, UK.
Department of Medicine, Guy's and St. Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust, London, UK.
Int J Surg. 2016 Jun;30:169-72. doi: 10.1016/j.ijsu.2016.04.032. Epub 2016 Apr 22.
Journals are an important conduit for the publication of research. However, the reporting quality of research has been shown to be lacking. We sought to determine if reporting quality could be improved by mandating compliance with the relevant reporting guidelines during the submission process to a single surgical journal.
The policy above was implemented in the International Journal of Surgery (IJS) in March 2013. This involved requiring all authors submitting observational studies, randomised controlled trials (RCTs) and systematic reviews to submit completed STROBE, CONSORT and PRISMA Statement checklists respectively along with their paper, making them available to the editor and peer-reviewers. Articles were analysed in three distinct periods from 2012 to 2014, before and after guideline implementation by two independent teams.
Our results show that overall STROBE compliance following implementation of the policy increased by a statistically significant 12% (68%-77%, p = 0.00018). Similarly CONSORT compliance increased (50%-70%) as did PRISMA compliance (48%-76%). The items that improved the most were those providing detail on study design, outcome definitions as well as measurement, how patients and quantitative variables were handled during the analyses and discussing limitations and detailing potential sources of bias.
Implementing a policy mandating the submission of a completed reporting guideline checklist for observational studies, RCTs and systematic reviews can increase compliance. We advocate this measure for other journals and for other study types.
期刊是发表研究成果的重要渠道。然而，研究报告的质量已经被证明存在不足。我们试图确定在向单一外科期刊提交研究成果的过程中，通过强制遵守相关报告准则，是否可以提高报告质量。
2013 年 3 月，国际外科杂志（IJS）实施了上述政策。这涉及要求所有提交观察性研究、随机对照试验（RCT）和系统评价的作者分别提交已完成的 STROBE、CONSORT 和 PRISMA 声明检查表，以及他们的论文，使这些检查表和论文可供编辑和同行评审者使用。在 2012 年至 2014 年期间，两个独立的团队分别在政策实施前后的三个不同时期对文章进行了分析。
我们的结果表明，在实施该政策后，STROBE 总体遵守率显著提高了 12%（68%-77%，p=0.00018）。同样，CONSORT 遵守率也有所提高（50%-70%），PRISMA 遵守率也有所提高（48%-76%）。改进最大的项目是那些详细说明了研究设计、结果定义以及测量方法、在分析过程中如何处理患者和定量变量、讨论局限性以及详细说明潜在偏差来源的项目。
实施一项强制性提交观察性研究、RCT 和系统评价完成报告准则检查表的政策，可以提高遵守率。我们主张其他期刊和其他研究类型也采取这一措施。
