Design and conduct
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1. Clear description of the goal of research, study objective(s), study design and study population | Yes | Unclear | No |
2. Clear description of outcomes, exposures/treatments and covariates, and their measurement methods | Yes | Unclear | No |
3. Validity of the study design | Yes | Unclear | No |
4. Clear statement and justification of sample size | Yes | Unclear | No |
5. Clear declaration of design violations and acceptability of the design violations | Yes | Unclear | No |
6. Consistency between the paper and its previously published protocol | Yes | Unclear | No |
Data analysis
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7. Correct and complete description of statistical methods | Yes | Unclear | No |
8. Valid statistical methods used and assumptions outlined | Yes | Unclear | No |
9. Appropriate assessment of treatment effect or interaction between treatment and another covariate | Yes | Unclear | No |
10. Correct use of correlation and associational statistical testing | Yes | Unclear | No |
11. Appropriate handling of continuous predictors | Yes | Unclear | No |
12. CIs do not include impossible values | Yes | Unclear | No |
13. Appropriate comparison of baseline characteristics between the study arms in randomised trials | Yes | Unclear | No |
14. Correct assessment and adjustment of confounding | Yes | Unclear | No |
15. Avoiding model extrapolation not supported by data | Yes | Unclear | No |
16. Adequate handling of missing data | Yes | Unclear | No |
Reporting and presentation
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17. Adequate and correct description of the data | Yes | Unclear | No |
18. Descriptive results provided as occurrence measures with CIs and analytical results provided as association measures and CIs along with p values | Yes | Unclear | No |
19. CIs provided for the contrast between groups rather than for each group | Yes | Unclear | No |
20. Avoiding selective reporting of analyses and p-hacking | Yes | Unclear | No |
21. Appropriate and consistent numerical precisions for effect sizes, test statistics and p values, and reporting the p values rather than their range | Yes | Unclear | No |
22. Providing sufficient numerical results that could be included in a subsequent meta-analysis | Yes | Unclear | No |
23. Acceptable presentation of figures and tables | Yes | Unclear | No |
Interpretation
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24. Interpreting the results based on association measures and 95% CIs along with p values, and correctly interpreting large p values as indecisive results, not evidence of absence of an effect | Yes | Unclear | No |
25. Using CIs rather than post hoc power analysis for interpreting the results of studies | Yes | Unclear | No |
26. Correctly interpreting occurrence or association measures | Yes | Unclear | No |
27. Distinguishing causation from association and correlation | Yes | Unclear | No |
28. Results of prespecified analyses are distinguished from the results of exploratory analyses in the interpretation | Yes | Unclear | No |
29. Appropriate discussion of the study methodological limitations | Yes | Unclear | No |
30. Drawing only conclusions supported by the statistical analysis and no generalisation of the results to subjects outside the target population | Yes | Unclear | No |