MEDICAL RESEARCH WRITING: Reporting guidelines to be followed while writing a biomedical literature review article
TITLE: The biomedical literature review’s recommended reporting guidelines:
An
accurate and complete reporting of research in the biomedical literature is
crucial for incorporating the results into clinical practice. Employing
reporting guidelines during this activity has become the general norm these
days among the peer reviewers, journal writers and authors. Not following them,
will result in inaccurate translation, interpretation and application of
published research. Therefore the purpose of following these reporting guidelines is to improve the quality, completeness and accuracy of original research
reports.
In
the year of 1994, two groups by the name ‘the Standards of Reporting of Trials
group’ and ‘the Asilomar Working Group on Recommendations for Reporting of
Clinical Trials in the Biomedical Literature’ published recommendations for
reporting practices involved in Biomedical literature. They later merged as the
CONSORT (CONsolidated Standards Of Reporting Trials) group in 1996, and
published the reporting guideline for reporting randomized controlled trials
(RCTs). It makes use of the advanced Delphi technique, a structured
communication technique for determining the consensus agreement. It works based
on the principles of structured information flow, anonymity and feedback to
optimize communication between experts.
The
CONSORT group have given 12 RCT reporting guidelines so far. However, according
to the statement issued by CONSORT, a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach cannot be
held true to all reporting guidelines. The first guideline called QUOROM (QUality
Of Reporting of Meta-analyses), is framed for improving the reporting of RCT’s
meta-analyses. A few of the other reporting guidelines for study designs
include PRISMA-Equity, SQUIRE (Standards for Quality Improvement Reporting
Excellence), TREND (Transparent REporting of Evaluations with Non-randomized
Designs), COREQ (Consolidated criteria for REporting Excellence), GRRAS (Guidelines
for Reporting Reliability and Agreement Studies) and STARD (STandards for the
Reporting of Diagnostic accuracy studies). Additionally, the MOOSE (Meta-analysis
Of Observational Studies in Epidemiology) guideline is developed to help authors
in reporting the observational studies’ systematic reviews.
In
fact, there is encouraging evidence about how effectively the reporting
guidelines can improve the reporting quality of the published researches. Hence
it is the need of the hour to adopt the above-mentioned reporting guidelines
for improving the overall quality of researches being published in the
biomedical journals sooner than later...
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