Transparency in clinical trials: Adding value to paediatric dental research

Background Even though considered as studies with high methodological power, many RCTs in paediatric dentistry do not have essential quality items in their design, development, and report, making results' reliability questionable, replication challenging to conduct, wasting time, money, and efforts, and even exposing the participants to research for no benefit. Aim We addressed the main topics related to transparency in clinical research, with an emphasis in paediatric dentistry. Design We searched for all controlled clinical trials published from January 2019 up to July 2020 in the three paediatric dentistry journals with high journal Impact Factor, indexed on Medline. These papers were assessed for transparency according to Open Science practices and regarding reporting accuracy using some items required by CONSORT. Results 53.6% of the studies declared registration, 75% had sample size calculation, 98.2% reported randomisation, and from those, 65.4% explained the randomisation method. Besides that, no study shared their data, and 6.8% were published in open access format. Conclusions Unfortunately, a large proportion of RCTs in paediatric dental research show a lack of transparency and reproducibility.

Automated summary

Many RCTs in paediatric dental research lack transparency and reproducibility, affecting the reliability, replicability, and quality of the studies.