A checklist is associated with increased quality of reporting preclinical biomedical research: A systematic review (original) (raw)
Fig 1
Outline of the study.
(A) Selection of articles: Twenty consecutive articles that met the inclusion criteria among those published beginning in January for both 2013 and 2015 in Nature (one that implemented a pre-submission checklist) and Cell (one that did not) journals. This represents articles from periods of time before and after the implementation of the checklist in May 2013. (B) Flow of the analysis: To examine whether quality of reporting has improved over time, the degree of key information reported in 2015 was compared to that in 2013 in both journals combined (Objective 1). To assess whether a checklist is associated with improved quality in reporting, we first compared the changes over time observed in Nature (④ vs. ③). If there was significant difference, we compared time “2015 vs. 2013” in Cell (② vs. ①) and Nature vs. _Ce_ll within 2013 (③ vs. ①) and 2015 (④ vs. ②) to adjust for differences between journals and changes over time in reporting (Objective 2).