Hindawi Publishing Corporation Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine Volume 2011, Article ID 183910, 25 pages doi:10.1155/2011/183910 Review Article Randomized Controlled Trials of Acupuncture (1997–2007): An Assessment of Reporting Quality with a CONSORT- and STRICTA-Based Instrument Richard Hammerschlag,1 Ryan Milley,1 Agatha Colbert,2 Jeffrey Weih,3 Beth Yohalem-Ilsley,1 Scott Mist,4 and Mikel Aickin5 1 Research Department, Oregon College of Oriental Medicine, Portland, OR 97216-2859, USA 2 Helfgott Research Institute, National College of Natural Medicine, Portland, OR 97201-4848, USA 3 Department of Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation, Kaiser Permanente Northwest, Portland, OR 97227-1110, USA 4 Fibromyalgia Research Unit, Oregon Health Science University, Portland, OR 97239-3098, USA 5 Program in Integrative Medicine and Department of Family & Community Medicine, College of Medicine, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85724-5052, USA Correspondence should be addressed to Richard Hammerschlag, rhammerschlag@ocom.edu Received 4 March 2010; Accepted 1 July 2010 Copyright © 2011 Richard Hammerschlag et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The present study describes the development of a comprehensive quality of reporting assessment tool and its application to acupuncture RCTs from 1997–2007. This Oregon CONSORT STRICTA Instrument (OCSI) is based on the revised CONSORT guidelines as modiﬁed by the STRICTA recommendations for acupuncture trials. Each of the resulting 27 OCSI items were applied to English language prospective RCTs that compared acupuncture, using manual and/or electro-stimulation, to no treatment, a sham procedure, or usual biomedical care. The 333 RCTs that met inclusion criteria were dispersed among 27 countries and 141 journals. Mean quality of reporting score for all articles was 63.0% (SD 16.5). Mean OCSI scores revealed a 30.9% improvement over the ten-year period (P < .001). Our ﬁndings suggest that to enhance quality of reporting, authors should better attend to seven speciﬁc OCSI items in three categories: practitioner training, adverse events, and aspects of randomization and blinding (n = 5). The broad diversity in geographical origin, publication site and quality of reporting, viewed in light of the considerable room for improvement in mean OCSI scores, emphasizes the importance of making STRICTA as well as CONSORT more widely known to journals and to the acupuncture research community. 1. Introduction Systematic reviews represent a retrospective, criteria-based approach for summarizing research ﬁndings [1–3]. By applying predetermined standards to identify the trials to be reviewed, and uniform criteria to evaluate the selected trials, bias in the quality assessment process is minimized. With the evidence based perspective being increasingly applied to complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) in the past decade, a wide variety of condition-focused systematic reviews have evaluated randomized controlled trials (RCTs) of acupuncture. MEDLINE alone lists over 170 of such reviews through 2009, many of which have, in turn, been summarized and analyzed [4–10]. As noted in these overviews, systematic reviews of acupuncture have employed a heterogeneous group of quality assessment instruments, that vary from the 5-item Jadad scale [11] and a modiﬁed 6-item Jadad scale [12–14], to the Cochrane Collaboration guidelines [15] and a range of broader scales containing up to 27 items [16]. In the present paper, we describe the development and application of a comprehensive quality of reporting in- strument for rating RCTs of acupuncture, based on the revised CONSORT guidelines for RCTs [17] as modiﬁed by the STRICTA recommendations for acupuncture tri- als [18]. The Consolidated Standards of Reporting Trials