Investigation and Evaluation of Chinese Clinical Practice Guidelines Published in Medical Journals in 2019:Reporting Status of Abstract

To investigate the reporting status of abstracts of Chinese clinical practice guidelines published in medical journals in 2019 and provide a reference for related researchers to write guideline abstracts and develop the reporting standard.

We systematically searched four electronic databases and additional sources for Chinese clinical practice guidelines published in medical journals in 2019. Four researchers independently screened the identified literature and extracted data related to abstracts. We analyzed the current status of abstract report, evaluated the reporting quality of guideline abstracts using the preliminary RIGHT-Abstract reporting checklist (consisting of 7 domains and 19 items) and assessed the consistency between the abstract and the main text.

A total of 226 guidelines were finally included, 96(42.5%) of which included abstracts. Among the 96 guidelines, 79(82.3%, 79/96) were published in Chinese and 17(17.7%, 17/96) were published in English. Among the 79 guidelines in Chinese, 52(65.8%, 52/79) provided bilingual abstracts in both Chinese and English. Of the 96 guidelines with abstracts, only 6(6.3%) guidelines included structured abstracts, and 16(16.7%) guidelines reported the main contents of recommendations in the abstract. The reporting rates in each RIGHT-Abstract domain were as follows: 61.0%(background), 13.0%(methods), 7.3%(results), 1.0%(review), 0(discussion, registry and funding). In terms of the consistency in content between the abstract and the main text, the item with the best consistency was the "diseases and health problems"(91.7%), followed by the "purpose "(78.1%), "target populations "(70.8%), "users"(38.5%) and "developers "(38.5%). For the rest of items, the consistencies were less than 20.0%.

The proportion of Chinese clinical practice guidelines published in medical journals in 2019 that included abstracts was relatively low, especially the structured abstracts, and the guideline abstracts provided limited information. It is necessary to develop and promote the formal reporting standard for the guideline abstracts in the future, so as to provide a guidance for related researchers.