Oxford PharmaGenesis was proud to present the results of its research into the benefits of medical writing support for randomized controlled trial (RCT) reporting at the fifth Evidence Live conference, held at the University of Oxford, 22–24 June 2016. The conference, a collaboration between the University of Oxford’s Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine and the British Medical Journal (BMJ), had the remit of encouraging debate on the current status and future directions of evidence-based medicine. Most attendees had no pharmaceutical industry connections, and included academics, physicians and journal editors.
Conference themes
The conference had five major themes
- Improving the quality of research evidence
- Disentangling the problems of too much and too little medicine
- Transforming the communication of evidence for better health
- Training the next generation of leaders in applied evidence
- Translating evidence into better-quality health services
Over the course of 113 talks, 14 workshops and 66 posters, a wide variety of different points of view were expressed regarding evidence-based medicine.
The role of professional medical writing support
The research presented by Oxford PharmaGenesis, published in BMJ Open this year (Gattrell et al., 2016), found that, of 244 primary reports of RCTs published in BioMed Central journals between 2000 and 2014, articles with declared medical writing support (n = 110) were significantly more likely to report at least 50% of a pre-defined subset of 12 Consolidated Standards of Reporting Trials (CONSORT) checklist items than articles without medical writing support (n = 123) (39.1% vs 21.1% of articles; p < 0.05). CONSORT items assessed were those previously shown to be poorly reported (Hopewell et al., 2010; Jacobs, 2010). As would be expected, the proportion of articles assessed by peer reviewers as having acceptable standards of written English was also higher among articles with medical writing support than among those without medical writing support (81.1% vs 47.9%), although the median time from journal submission to acceptance was longer among articles with medical writing support than among those without medical writing support (167 days vs 136 days).
References
Gattrell WT, Hopewell S, Young K et al. Professional medical writing support and the quality of randomised controlled trial reporting: a cross-sectional study. BMJ Open 2016;6:e010329.
Hopewell S, Dutton S, Yu LM, Chan AW, Altman DG. The quality of reports of randomised trials in 2000 and 2006: comparative study of articles indexed in PubMed. BMJ 2010;340:c723.
Jacobs A. Adherence to the CONSORT guidelines in papers written by professional medical writers. Write Stuff 2010;19:196–9.
