Making research articles fit for purpose: structured reporting of key methods and findings

‘If physicians are to base treatment decisions on the evidence in the medical literature, all the relevant results of trials must be available easily and consistently. Yet it is common to have trouble identifying the hypothesis, the research question, and the design of a published trial. It is even more common to lose count of the participants or to be unable to tell who received what therapies and the type of analysis used. As a result, it is often impossible to know whether the conclusions are justified by the data’ [1].