The Application Status of STROBE Guidelines and the improving strategy for the Medical Journals: A Study of CSCD indexed Biomedical Journals in Shanghai

Abstract

Strengthening the Reporting of Observational Studies in Epidemiology (STROBE) Statement guidelines provides important reference for editing or writing observational studies. In order to improving the editorial quality of retrospective study published in medical journals, this study analyzed the application status of STROBE guidelines of Shanghai biomedical Journals indexed in CSCD, and provide the scientific-rigor-improving strategy for writing and editing the retrospective study in medical journals. Firstly, all the articles published from 2023-2024 which mentioned STROBE in the full-text was retrieved through PubMed. Then we retrieved the CSCD-indexed medical journals in Shanghai which published the retrospective studies, meanwhile with the full-text word cohort study, cross-sectional study and case-control study showed in the title or abstracts. RAWGraphs 2.0 was used to draw Sanky diagram. GraphPad Prism 10.0 software was used to carry out non-parametric tests and to draw Violin Plot in this study. The AIGC large language model Kimi Moonshot (https://kimi.moonshot.cn/) is used to validate statistical results. Besides, Wilcoxon rank-sum test was used to compare the retrospective term in title and in abstracts. The result of this study showed that, 26 medical journals published clinical research articles were included (biological journals were excluded) in this study, with 7 journals in English, 19 journals in Chinese. Compared with the title, the terms of retrospective cohort, case-control study or cross-sectional were more frequently showed in the abstracts. Wilcoxon rank-sum test showed that there was significance difference between the title and the abstract (P<0.05). According to the 22 items released by STROBE Statement checklist, this study found that the main issues existed in the articles contains but not confined in the following aspects: 1) The title or abstract does not specify the type of research. 2) Mis-use of research types, retrospective cohort study is sometimes mis-considered as case-control study. 3) Statistical analysis issues. 4) Flowchart is always missing in the article. 5) Bias analysis and limitation analysis are always not included in the article. All the existed problems should be equally solved. Therefore, we could see that, strictly following STROBE items for writing or editing is beneficial for improving the writing quality and scientific rigor of a medical journal.