January 23, 2022
Meta-research is the discipline of studying research itself. A core investigative tool in meta-research is the use of systematic or scoping reviews to study the characteristics, methods, and reporting of primary research studies. In the context of identifying eligible publications for methodological reviews of randomized controlled trials (RCTs), a challenge is to efficiently distinguish the primary trial report from other types of reports. The authors of this paper draw on their recent methodological review of over 13,000 records to identify primary reports of pragmatic RCTs and offer recommendations to improve the reporting of RCTs to facilitate more efficient identification of primary trial reports. Monica Taljaard, PhD, member of the IMPACT Design and Statistics Core, was a contributing author.