With the increasingly prominent contradiction between limited health resources and the growing population, priority setting of health research, as a response, has received widespread attention from health systems worldwide. As the results of priority setting at different levels increase year by year, some questions in the results reporting are also constantly emerging. For example, the process of producing the results is vague, too dependent on individual subjective judgment, the participation of individual stakeholder groups is limited or lack of voice, unable to identify potential conflicts of interest, and so on. It does not only seriously affect the effectiveness and rationality of the results themselves, but also create intangible obstacles to their promotion and adoption. In 2019, BMC Medical Research Methodology published ‘Reporting guideline for priority setting of health research (REPRISE)’, which makes uniform specifications for more comprehensive and consistent reporting of results in priority areas. This paper interpreted the background, formulation process and key contents of the REPRISE guideline, with an aim to promote the application of the reporting guideline in China.
ObjectiveTo systematically sort out acupuncture therapy research report specification issues and provide a reference for the selection of key problems in the specification of acupuncture therapy network meta-analysis reports. MethodsComputer searches of PubMed, Embase, Web of Science, Cochrane Library, CNKI, WanFang Data, and VIP databases were conducted to collect studies related to reporting norms for acupuncture therapy, with a search time from inception to November 2022. Questions were constructed according to the SPIDER model and inclusion and exclusion criteria were developed. CASP was used to evaluate the methodological quality of the included literature, and a qualitative systematic evaluation thematic synthesis method was used to analyze, summarize, and integrate the questions on reporting norms for acupuncture therapy research evidence to create a pool of question entries. ResultsA total of 66 papers covering four countries were included, including 17 papers from qualitative studies and 49 papers from quantitative studies. The CASP evaluation results showed that the overall quality of the included studies was high, and the quality of the English studies was higher than that of the Chinese studies. The thematic synthesis method resulted in 22 question entries in 7 categories. The 7 categories of questions included title, abstract, preface, methods, results, discussion and other report specification questions. The 22 entries included "Is there a need to report specific types of acupuncture therapy", "Is there a need to report based on the type of original study and its number", etc. ConclusionThere are many problems with reporting norms in existing acupuncture studies, so it is necessary to collate and summarize the key issues of reporting norms for acupuncture network meta-analysis to provide a scientific and theoretical basis for the development of reporting guidelines for acupuncture network meta-analysis.
