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The CONSORT (CONsolidated Standards of Reporting Trials) 2010 guideline is intended to improve the reporting of parallel-group randomized controlled trial (RCT), enabling readers to understand a trial's design, conduct, analysis and interpretation, and to assess the validity of its results. This can only be achieved through complete adherence and transparency by authors.

If you are looking for tips on how to write a good scientific abstract, particularly for a randomised trial, this short series of “before and after” examples illustrates how an abstract can be improved relatively easily by using the reporting guideline checklist - CONSORT for abstracts.  The author of this presentation, Sally Hopewell, makes a series of simple changes to three published abstracts - both removing inessential information and adding essential items from the checklist – to improve them and at the same time keep them within the word limit. 

You can view the presentation by clicking here.

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