Assessing the Quality of Randomized Controlled Trials Published in the Journal of Korean Medical Science from 1986 to 2011

Low quality clinical trials have a possibility to have errors in the process of deriving the results and therefore distort the study. Quality assessment of clinical trial is necessary in order to prevent any clinical application erroneous results is important. Randomized controlled trial (RCT) is a design for evaluate the effectiveness of medical procedure. This study was conducted by extracting the RCTs from the original articles published in the Journal of Korean Medical Science (JKMS) from 1986 to 2011 and conducting a qualitative analysis using three types of analysis tools: Jadad scale, van Tulder scale and Cochrane Collaboration risk of bias Tool. To compare the quality of articles of JKMS, quality analysis of the RCTs published in Yonsei Medical Journal (YMJ) and Korean Journal of Internal Medicine was also conducted. In the JKMS, YMJ and Korean Journal of Internal Medicine, the quantitative increase of RCT presented over time was observed but no qualitative improvement of RCT was observed over time. From the results of this study, it is required for the researchers to plan for and perform higher quality studies.