Background Reporting quality of clinical trials has been addressed by the CONSORT group for randomised controlled trials (RCTs) first in 1996 with updates in 2001 and 2010.

Objective We hypothesised that the quality of reporting in sports injury prevention abstracts has increased from 2005 to 2008 as did the amount of RCTs at the 1st versus 2nd World Congress of Sports Injury Prevention in Oslo vesus Tromsø.

Design Analysis of the published abstracts of the 2005 and 2008 World Conference on Sports Injury Prevention, two independent analysts.

Setting 154 abstracts from the 2005 and 186 abstracts from 2008 World Conferences were analysed.

Main outcome measures Evidence-based study design, scores of 17 CONSORT criteria for RCT.

Results RCTs were published in 9.1% in 2005 versus 10.2% in 2008 (p=0.727) of all published abstracts. Improvement in reporting was evident for RCTs in the CONSORT score 5.8±0.9 versus 8.6±2.9 (p=0.001, CI −4.29 to −1.43). Detailed description of main outcomes demonstrated the most significant improvement in reporting in the abstracts of RCTs (0% vs 57.9%, p<0.001). Study design mentioned in the title, trial design, participants, blinding, number analysed, outcome and funding tended to but did not improve significantly in the reporting RCTs in conference abstracts. No improvement at all over the 3 years was noted for reporting quality of the title randomised, authors, intervention, objectives/hypothesis, randomisation, numbers randomised, recruitment, and number analysed, harms and trial registration.

Conclusion While the percentage of published RCTs in abstracts at the World Congress of Sports Injury Prevention remained mainly unchanged, improvement in reporting of abstracts was evident from 2005 to 2008 determined by CONSORT criteria. Further substantial and comprehensive use of the recently updated CONSORT 2010 criteria might further increase the quality of reporting of sports injury conference RCTs in the future and should be endorsed.