Background: An increasing number of acupuncture clinical trials are being registered, but the reports of results and data transparency are unclear. This paper aims to analyze and evaluate the current state of registration and reports of acupuncture clinical studies and seek feasible solutions to improve the quality of acupuncture clinical studies, leading to minimizing waste of public resources and effectively providing a reliable evidence-based basis for clinical practice.
Methods: This paper will focus on the acupuncture clinical trials that met the criteria in relevant studies registered and published during the period between 1 Jan 2013 to 31 Dec 2021.The search and registration platforms were the Clinicaltrials.gov and the Chinese Clinical Trial Registry (ChiCTR). The literature search platforms were Web of Science, PubMed, CNKI, WanFang, VIP, and China Biomedical Literature Database (SinoMed).
Results: A total of 403 trials were included in ChiCTR and 519 trials were included in Clinicaltrials.gov. The overall reporting rate of acupuncture clinical trial results from the two registration centres was was 25%. Clinicaltrials.gov reporting rate was 12% and that from ChiCTR was 41%.
Conclusion: The number of acupuncture clinical trial registrations is steadily increasing, but the reporting rate of trial results is relatively low and the transparency of data is not ideal. Due to the fact that the unavailability of the registered trial results caused a waste of research resources and funds, there is a shortage of research in the relevant area. Therefore, first of all, researchers should put more attention on clinical trial reports in acupuncture and respect science; secondly, it is recommended to set up a research progress tracker on registration platforms accessible to the public users, which contributes to the supervision of research projects; at the same time, the journal is suggested that also adjust the evaluation criteria for reporting the negative results to reduce the probability of results bias; most importantly, the government is recommended to optimize the closing review, strengthen the monitoring of core outcome indicators, standardize clinical reports to reduce the waste of public resources.
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