Analysis of the quantity and quality of published randomised controlled trials related to injury prevention from 2001 to 2010 in China.

OBJECTIVE To report the quantity and quality of published randomised controlled trails (RCT) on injury prevention in China. DESIGN Bibliometric analysis. SETTING China, 2001-2010. DATA SOURCES The published RCTs that were indexed by four domestic electronic databases and two international databases between 1 January 2001 and 31 December 2010. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES Numbers and proportions of published RCTs and those that did not report or specify the quality items recommended by Cochrane Handbook for Systematic Reviews of Intervention V.5.0.0. RESULTS Of 4834 publications of injury prevention, 25 RCTs with 55,431 participants were identified. One study had no full text. Twenty-three RCTs were published in Chinese language. All 25 studies chose education as the intervention, including 19 studies using education as single intervention and 6 studies using education as a part of combined intervention. Eighteen of 19 studies that used injury incidence rate as the primary outcome measure; 10 studies reported 24-59% reductions in injury incidence rate in the intervention group, and 8 studies reported 24-76% rate difference between the intervention group and the control group after the implementation of intervention. Only 1 study reported no significant difference. The other 6 studies only reported improvements in knowledge, attitude and practice/behaviour. None of 24 studies with full text included the information of 'allocation concealment', 'blinding' and 'free of early stopping bias'. CONCLUSIONS The value of 25 published RCTs cannot be determined due to the lack of quality information. More high-quality RCTs need to be performed in the future.