The before mentioned studies by De Betker-Grob et al. [ 21], Hummel and Ijzerman [ 22], and Mühlbacher et al. [ 23] did not report quality criteria.
Both of them are the most widely accepted criteria for reporting quality assessment in acupuncture studies.
Overall, most studies on humanistic burden met good reporting quality standards in accordance with STROBE criteria (Table 1).
The overall reporting quality of included studies to the STARD criteria was poor.
Six criteria were used to summarise the methodology and reporting quality of studies.
Most of the 25 respondents reporting having quality criteria for assemblies in place employed more than one criterion.
Finally, our composite outcomes were defined post hoc, and although they give a general idea of the way AR reported several quality criteria in the same study, they should be interpreted with caution.
Egger found in one meta analysis of 60 studies that unpublished studies had lower methodological quality than published trials and that they did not report important quality criteria such as concealment of allocation or blinding [ 70].
No one paper in any category covered all reporting or quality criteria as set out by their corresponding check-list.
Within the assessed studies, the best-fulfilled quality criteria were: reporting statistics, reporting primer sequence, and defining the case group (Fig. 2).
