Revised STandards for Reporting Interventions in Clinical Trials of Acupuncture (STRICTA) : extending the CONSORT statement

Reporting guidelines are recommendations to help write up research clearly.

Your research will be used by people from different disciplines and backgrounds for decades to come. Reporting guidelines are community-created recommendations for describing what you did and what you found so that everyone can understand, repeat, apply, and synthesise your work. Although they recommend information to include in your manuscript, they don’t dictate how to order that information.

Most reporting guidelines consist of the full guidance (sometimes called an Explanation and Elaboration document) and a checklist. The full guidance provides detailed explanations and examples for each item, and the checklist allows you to demonstrate adherence to editors.

You can use reporting guidelines throughout your research process. However you use reporting guidelines, please cite them.

Writing manuscripts

Write confidently using a reporting guideline to quickly turn a blank page into a thorough and impactful manuscript.

Checking

Use a reporting checklist to demonstrate to an editor or peer reviewer that you have included everything. Many journals require completed checklists at submission.

Writing applications

Reporting guidelines can help you write funding applications, ethics applications, and protocols, but they won’t make design decisions for you!

Reporting guidelines are neither design nor quality appraisal tools.

Although reporting guidelines recommend information to include when writing up research, they do not mandate how to design research. Similarly, when reviewing literature, although you can use reporting guidelines to assess whether a manuscript is well reported, you cannot use them to appraise whether that study is well designed.

Key information

Reporting guideline acronym

STRICTA

Provided for

Interventions in clinical trials of acupuncture

Relevant URLs (full-text if available)

The STRICTA checklist is available from the STRICTA website.

PubMed ID

Downloads

Bibliographic reference

Commonly used reporting guidelines

STROBE Observational Studies
PRISMA Systematic reviews of trials
PRISMA-P Systematic review protocols
CONSORT Randomised trials
SPIRIT Randomised trial protocols
SRQR Qualitative Research
CARE Case Reports
STARD Diagnostic studies
TRIPOD+AI Prediction Models
ARRIVE Animal Research
SQUIRE Quality Improvement
CHEERS Economic Evaluations
Search all

MacPherson H, Altman DG, Hammerschlag R, Youping L, Taixiang W, White A, Moher D; STRICTA Revision Group. Revised STandards for Reporting Interventions in Clinical Trials of Acupuncture (STRICTA): extending the CONSORT statement. PLoS Med. 2010;7(6):e1000261.

Additional information

Language

English

Availability in additional languages

The STRICTA statement has been translated into the following languages: Chinese; Japanese; Korean; Russian. Please visit the following URL for more information and full-text downloads: http://www.stricta.info/translations.htm
Visit our translations page to find out what other reporting guidelines are available in languages other than English: reporting guideline translations

Study design

  • Clinical trials
  • Experimental studies

Clinical area

  • Complementary and alternative medicine

Applies to the whole report or to individual sections of the report?

  • Whole report

Reporting guideline website URL

Previous versions of this guideline / Guideline history

This revised guidance replaces STRICTA 2001 (PMID: 12184354 , PMID: 11926601, PMID: 11890439)

Other

Additional Information