Review of randomised controlled trials of traditional Chinese medicine

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
We randomly selected 28 journals using stratified sampling from a total of 100 Chinese journals of traditional Chinese medicine (4 national, 10 university, 10 provincial or regional, and 4 specialist journals). After special training, eight fifth year medical students (working in pairs) hand searched all the issues of the journals published before 1 January 1997 to identify randomised controlled trials. Discrepancies were settled by one of the principal investigators (S-YZ). Data on methodological quality of randomised controlled trials were extracted from 414 full length articles in the Chinese Journal of Integrated Traditional and Western Medicine. Ten times as many randomised controlled trials appeared in that journal as in the other journals, and those published in that journal were of a higher quality.1 2