STRICTA has been designed to improve the standards for reporting interventions in clinical trials of acupuncture. These guidelines provide authors a way to structure their reports of interventions using a checklist. The aim is to facilitate transparency in published reports, enabling a better understanding and interpretation of results, aiding their critical appraisal, and providing detail that is necessary for replicability.
The 2010 version has been developed in conjunction with the CONSORT Group Executive, such that the latest version of STRICTA has become an official extension to the CONSORT Statement.
STRICTA may be viewed and freely downloaded from this website. The core content of the STRICTA guidelines consists of a checklist of six key items, with each item within the checklist having an explanation and a series of examples of good reporting.
Translations
We welcome the opportunity to make STRICTA available in different languages. Please see our translated versions in Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Russian.
Citing the STRICTA statement (for authors)
If you are using the STRICTA guidelines from this website, we recommend that you use journal article citations rather than citing this website.
If you are not already using a journal article citation, please cite :
MacPherson H, Altman DG, Hammerschlag R, Youping L, Taixiang W, White A, Moher D. Revised STandards for Reporting Interventions in Clinical Trials of Acupuncture (STRICTA): Extending the CONSORT Statement. PLoS Med 2010; 7(6): e1000261. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.1000261. [full text]
Using the STRICTA guidelines
The STRICTA guidelines are distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
However, because the guidelines represent a consensus agreed through successive drafts by the STRICTA Group, they should not be edited or modified in any way, although it is acceptable to publish portions (e.g. the checklist).