A Quantitative Assessment of the Reporting Quality of Herbal Medicine Research: The Road to Improvement.

Objectives: To quantify different aspects of the quality of reporting of herbal medicine clinical trials, to determine how that quality is affecting the conclusions of meta-analyses, and to target areas for improvement in future herbal medicine research reporting.

Study Design: The Electronic databases PubMed, Academic Search Premier, ScienceDirect, and Alt HealthWatch were searched for meta-analyses of herbal medicines in refereed journals and Cochrane Reviews in the years 2000-2004 and 2010-2014. The search was limited to meta-analyses of randomized controlled trials involving humans and published in English.