Assessment of adherence to the CONSORT statement for quality of reports on randomized controlled trial abstracts from four high-impact general medical journals

Table 1 Number of RCTs published in four major general medical journals

Journal name	Abstract formats	Impact factor*	Number of RCTs identified, n(%) (n = 332)	Number of included RCTs, n(%) (n = 271)
NEJM	IMRAD⁺	53.5	128 (38.6)	113 (41.7)
Lancet	IMRAD⁺	33.6	92 (27.7)	80 (29.5)
JAMA	Eight-heading format⁺⁺	30.0	51 (15.4)	43 (15.9)
BMJ	Eight-heading format⁺⁺	13.5	61 (18.4)	35 (12.9)

* JCR 2010 Impact factor; ⁺ introduction/background, method, results, and discussion format; ⁺⁺ objective, design, setting, participants, intervention, main outcome measure, results, and conclusions format.

ISSN: 1745-6215