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Assessing the quality of reports of randomized clinical trials: Is blinding necessary?

AR Jadad‚ RA Moore‚ D. Carroll‚ C. Jenkinson‚ DJM Reynolds‚ DJ Gavaghan and HJ McQuay

Abstract

It has been suggested that the quality of clinical trials should be assessed by blinded raters to limit the risk of introducing bias into meta-analyses and systematic reviews, and into the peer-review process. There is very little evidence in the literature to substantiate this. This study describes the development of an instrument to assess the quality of reports of randomized clinical trials (RCTs) in pain research and its use to determine the effect of rater blinding on the assessments of quality. A multidisciplinary panel of six judges produced an initial version of the instrument. Fourteen raters from three

Details

Journal

Controlled Clinical Trials

Keywords

articles

Month

Feb

Number

1

Pages

1–12

Publisher

Elsevier Science

Volume

17

Year

1996

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