Quality Assessment of Published Clinical Trials of Mashhad University of Medical Sciences Between 1999 and 2018

Clinical trials are used extensively in the compilation of systematic review studies and clinical guidelines. Critical appraisal of articles is a part of systematic review writing and also effective in citation. This study aimed to evaluate quality of randomized clinical trial articles of Mashhad University of Medical Sciences with consideration report of randomized, blindness, and allocation concealment methods in them.

In this study, all randomized clinical trials with Mashhad University of Medical Sciences affiliation indexed in PubMed by 2018 were evaluated.

Of 257 eligible articles, dentistry (n=44 , 17.1%) , obstetrics and gynecology (n=28 , 10.9%) and internal medicine (n=23 , 8.9%) had the highest relative frequency of published randomized clinical trial articles. Eithy-three articles (32.3%) reported the randomization method and most of them (86.9%) used simple randomization. Blinding was done in 138 papers (53.7%) with double blinding being the most common (70.2%). Only three articles (1.2%) reported allocation concealment.

The report of "random allocation and randomization" in articles was far less than acceptable. It may seem that there may be different biases in the methodology. Upholding the principles of scientific writing and avoiding errors and biases increase the validity of the scientific articles and citation, which is one of the criteria of the scientific ranking of top universities.