Guidance for Developers of Health Research Reporting Guidelines

enterprise. On any given month about 63,000 new articles are indexed in PubMed, the United States National Library of Medicine’s public access portal for health-related publications. However, the quality of reporting in most health care journals remains inadequate. Glasziou and colleagues [1] assessed descriptions of given treatments in 80 trials and systematic reviews for which summaries were published during one year (October 2005 to October 2006) in Evidence-Based Medicine, a journal that is aimed at physicians working in primary care and general medicine. Treatment descriptions were inadequate in 41 of the original published articles, which made their use in clinical practice difficult if not impossible to replicate. This is just one of numerous examples of a large and disturbing literature indicating the general failure in the quality of reporting health research [2–6]. Many publications lack clarity, transparency, and completeness in how the authors actually carried out their research