Critical Appraisal of the Randomized Controlled Trial Studies Reports in Nursing Journals

Randomized controlled trial studies provide substantial evidence for evaluation of the effectiveness of nursing interventions. Evidence-based practice is the ultimate goal of nursing and requires integration of the best research documents to present high quality health care.
This descriptive cross-sectional study is aimed to determine methodological quality of randomized controlled trials reports in the Iranian Nursing Journals with the Persian and English language with the Oxford quality scoring system or the Jadad Scale.
Searching for nursing randomized controlled trial articles which were indexed in various databases, including SID, Magiran, Irandoc, Iranmedex and Google Scholar were done by these Persian and English keywords, randomized controlled trial and clinical trial in combination with Nursing. After applying the inclusion criteria and removing irrelevant articles, only 42 articles were left to review. They were assessed by the Oxford quality scoring system or the Jadad Scale.
The mean of the methodological quality of the selected articles was 1.38±1.07 based on the three direct questions for bias control in the Jadad Scale (minimum favorable mean is 3 points). From 42 selected articles only 31% applied a random allocation with low bias, 9.6% of the articles applied double-blind or single-blind methods during the sampling. Attrition was only mentioned in 7.1% of the articles.
Considering the vital role of randomized controlled trial studies during the evidence-based performance in nursing is important. Any weaknesses in the methodology and inadequate reporting of the results could lead to bias and the wrong conclusions in the study. Based on the findings, it is obvious that there is a need to improve the quality of reporting of the nursing randomized controlled trials in the Iranian Nursing Journals with the Persian and English language, especially in the methodology part.