The quality of reporting of randomized clinical trials could be significantly improved by the application of CONSORT （Consolidated Standards of Reporting Trials） statement. We compared and analyzed the difference of acceptance of CONSORT statement between Chinese medical journals and Western medical journals, and proposed to disseminate and apply CONSORT statement to improve the quality of reporting of randomized clinical trials and medical journals.
New interventions are rapidly progressing into clinical practice through the preclinical study stage. The animal experiments should be comprehensive and critically evaluated for their pivotal role in this process. To integrate the evidence of animal studies by systematic review throws light on intervention outcomes and could decrease risk of participants in human trials. The methodological weakness of animal studies is easy to highlight but robust methods to synthesize evidence is essential. Here, we discuss some problems in systematic review of animal experiments and whether animal models of diverse species contribute to bias of meta-analysis conclusions.
Objective To collect the report guidelines for systematic reviews and meta-analyses, so as to provide support for the standardized publish and spread of those guidelines. Methods Such databases as Ovid MEDLINE (1996-2010) and EMbase (till April, 2010) were searched with the terms of “guideline”, “report”, “systematic review” and “meta-analysis” to collect the report guidelines for systematic reviews and meta-analyses. The irrelevant literatures (e.g. systematic review of a specific disease, clinical guideline for a certain disease, and other literatures focusing on the methodology of systematic review without mentioning reporting guideline) were excluded by reading the abstracts and titles, and then the further verification was done after the full-texts had been read. The contents about how to report a systematic review or meta-analyses were extracted from the included studies which were classified by its form of the original research (e.g. randomized controlled trial, observational study, diagnostic trial, etc.). Results Primary search ended up with 285 literatures, and 26 literatures of which were included. Among the included literatures about the report guidelines for systematic reviews and meta-analyses, eight were about RCTs, two about non-RCTs, two about observational study, no literature about diagnostic trial, one about animal experiment, two about report searching strategy, five about quality assessment, six about the influence on quality, and the other two about the update of guidelines. Conclusion The report guidelines for systematic reviews and meta-analyses are considerable in number, among which the QUOROM and its updated version PRISMA are relatively mature and widely applied. Report guidelines are beneficial to improve the quality of systematic reviews and meta-analyses, and the report guideline focusing on specific field is needs to be formulate.