Related Experiment Video
Updated: Oct 19, 2025

Author Spotlight: Evaluating the Adjuvant Efficacy and Safety of Angong Niuhuang Pill in Viral Encephalitis Treatment
Published on: April 19, 2024
Evaluation of reporting quality of randomized controlled trials in patients with COVID-19 using the CONSORT statement
Yuhuan Yin1, Fugui Shi2, Yiyin Zhang1
1School of Nursing, Gansu University of Chinese Medicine, Lanzhou, China.
Objective:
To evaluate the reporting quality of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) regarding patients with COVID-19 and analyse the influence factors.
Methods:
PubMed, Embase, Web of Science and the Cochrane Library databases were searched to collect RCTs regarding patients with COVID-19. The retrieval time was from the inception to December 1, 2020. The CONSORT 2010 statement was used to evaluate the overall reporting quality of these RCTs.
Results:
53 RCTs were included. The study showed that the average reporting rate for 37 items in CONSORT checklist was 53.85% with mean overall adherence score of 13.02±3.546 (ranged: 7 to 22). The multivariate linear regression analysis showed the overall adherence score to the CONSORT guideline was associated with journal impact factor (P = 0.006), and endorsement of CONSORT statement (P = 0.014).
Conclusion:
Although many RCTs of COVID-19 have been published in different journals, the overall reporting quality of these articles was suboptimal, it can not provide valid evidence for clinical decision-making and systematic reviews. Therefore, more journals should endorse the CONSORT statement, authors should strictly follow the relevant provisions of the CONSORT guideline when reporting articles. Future RCTs should particularly focus on improvement of detailed reporting in allocation concealment, blinding and estimation of sample size.
Related Concept Videos
Types of Biopharmaceutical Studies: Controlled and Non-Controlled Approaches
Non-controlled studies, commonly employed for initial exploration, lack a control group, rendering them susceptible to biases and external influences. In contrast,...
Clinical Trials
There are four phases in a clinical trial. A phase one...
Clinical Trials: Overview
Bioavailability Study Design: Healthy Subjects Versus Patients
Study Designs in Epidemiology
Observational studies are those where the researcher does not intervene but rather observes natural variations. They include cross-sectional, cohort, and...
Controls in Experiments

