Improving the transparency and integrity of scientific reports on health. New instructions for authors!

Abstract

Healthcare practice should be based on the best available evidence, coming from rigorous research methodologies. 1 Improvement of practice, going from doing no harm to incorporation of new technologies in public assistance, therefore requires access to robust scientific evidence, through the availability of good and complete research reports. However, what we see today is that access to high-quality evidence is somewhat hampered by poor reporting. More than 80% of clinical trials and observational studies published today fail to report one or more important feature of their methodology or results. 2 Inconsistent, biased, incomplete and inaccurate reports are published in the medical literature every day. 3,4 However, we have resources to fight this battle: just as we have clinical guidelines for practice, we also have reporting guidelines to help authors to write and publish better research reports. These are the articles that systematic reviewers use to synthetize the evidence and inform practice. Reporting guidelines have existed for more than 20 years now. However, adherence to them by authors, peer reviewers and journals has been modest and slow. 2,5-7 The São Paulo Medical Journal has taken a step forward in the direction of improving transparency, quality and integ