Impact of assessing during peer review the consistency between the CONSORT checklist & the submitted manuscript on the completeness of reporting

Randomised trials are considered the gold standard in medical research. The CONSORT Statement aims to improve the quality of reporting of randomised trials. Without transparent reporting, readers cannot judge the reliability of trial findings, therefore these findings cannot inform clinical practice. Different stakeholders, including biomedical journals, have taken different actions to try to improve author adherence to CONSORT. The most popular one is to instruct authors to submit a completed CONSORT checklist with page numbers indicating where the CONSORT items are addressed when they submit their manuscript. However, this measure alone has proven not to be effective. In this study, we intend to assess whether evaluating the checklists submitted by authors and providing feedback to them as part of the peer review process improves the completeness of reporting of published trials.