NCT05820984

A Short SPIRIT Checklist for Peer Reviewers to Improve the Reporting Quality in Published Articles (SPIRIT-PR)

Impact of a Short Form of the SPIRIT Checklist for Peer Reviewers to Improve the Reporting of Protocols for Randomised Controlled Trials Published in Biomedical Journals: a Randomised Controlled Trial (SPIRIT-PR)

• Status: Completed
• Phase: N/A
• Study type: Interventional
• Enrollment: 178 (actual)
• Sponsor: University of Oxford · Academic / Other
• Sex: All
• Age: 18 Years
• Healthy volunteers: Accepted

Summary

Transparent and accurate reporting is key, so that readers can adequately interpreting the results of a study. The aim of this project is to evaluate whether reminding peer reviewers of the most important SPIRIT reporting items (including a short explanation of those items) will result in higher adherence to SPIRIT guidelines in published protocols for RCTS. During the standard peer-review process, peer-reviewers will be randomly allocated to use either (i) a short version of the SPIRIT checklist including the ten most important and poorly reported SPIRIT items ; or (ii) no checklist. The aim is to find an intervention which improves the reporting, making it easier for readers to adequately interpret the presented articles.

Detailed description

The full protocol is available on Open Science Framework where the study was prospectively registered: https://osf.io/z2hm9

Conditions

• Adequate Reporting in Published Study Protocols of Randomized Controlled Trials

Interventions

Type	Name	Description
OTHER	SPIRIT checklist plus usual practice	Peer reviewer will be reminded of the following 10 CONSORT items (including a short description): Outcomes (12) Sample size (14) Recruitment (15) Allocation implementation (16 c) Blinding (17 a) Data collection methods (18 a) Data collection methods - retention (18 b) Statistical methods (20 a) Population analysed (20 c) Access to data (29)
OTHER	Usual practice	Peer review as it is usual practice at the journal

Timeline

• Start date: 2020-06-01
• Primary completion: 2022-06-30
• Completion: 2022-06-30
• First posted: 2023-04-20
• Last updated: 2023-04-20

Locations

1 site across 1 country: United Kingdom