Received: 8 August 2021 Revised: 30 June 2022 Accepted: 28 September 2022 DOI: 10.1111/hir.12464 REVIEW ARTICLE Finding and evaluating randomised controlled trials in nursing conducted by Spanish research teams: A scoping review Melixa Medina-Aedo MSc 1 | Elena Torralba-Martinez MSc 1 | Cristian Segura-Carrillo MSW 2 | Diana Buitrago-García MSc 3,4 | Ivan Solà BSc 5,6 | Héctor Pardo-Hernandez BA, MPH, PhD 5,6 | 5,6 Xavier Bonfill MD, MPH, PhD 1 Department of Paediatrics, Obstetrics & Gynaecology and Preventive Medicine Abstract and Public Health at the Universitat Background/objectives: To identify and assess the main characteristics and Autònoma de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain the potential risk of bias of randomised controlled trials (RCTs) in nursing con- 2 Departamento de Trabajo Social, ducted by Spanish research teams. Universidad de Concepci on, Concepcion, Chile Methods: Scoping review of an electronic search in three major databases 3 Institute of Social and Preventive (date of search: October 2021). For the eligible studies, both descriptive data, Medicine, University of Bern, and data to assess the potential risk of bias, were collected and analysed. Bern, Switzerland 4 Results: Of 3391 references retrieved, 199 were eligible. These RCTs were pub- Programa de Epidemiología Clínica, Fundaci on Universitaria de Ciencias de la lished in 122 journals, most of them in English (101, 82.1%) and were included Salud-FUCS, Bogota, Colombia in the Journal Citation Report (JCR) (107, 87.7%). Moreover, 32 (26.2%) of 5 Iberoamerican Cochrane Centre, those included in the JCR were classified under nursing. Two thirds Biomedical Research Institute Sant Pau (IIB SantPau), Barcelona, Spain (81, 66.4%) of the journals followed the CONSORT guidelines. A total of 6 CIBER de Epidemiología y Salud Pública 65 RCTs (33.7%) had a high overall risk of bias. (CIBERESP), Universitat Autònoma Discussion: Most of the identified RCTs were published in journals not Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain specific to nursing and in English language. Also, shortcomings in RCT design Correspondence and reporting were observed despite recommendations to adhere the Melixa Medina-Aedo, Department of CONSORT guidelines. Paediatrics, Obstetrics & Gynaecology and Conclusion: Comprehensive identification of RCTs in nursing may require Preventive Medicine and Public Health at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, searching in journals other than nursing-related. RCTs from Spanish research Av. de Can Domènech, 737, 08193 teams are more likely to be published in international journals published in Cerdanyola del Vallès, Barcelona, Spain. Email: mmedinaa@santpau.cat English. CONSORT should be strongly advised to encourage proper design and reporting of RCTs. [The copyright line for this article was changed on 13 December 2022 after KEYWORDS original online publication] evidence-based nursing (EBN); literature searching; nurses; nursing; randomised controlled trial (RCT); review, scoping This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution‐NonCommercial‐NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non‐commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made. © 2022 The Authors. Health Information and Libraries Journal published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Health Libraries Group 312 wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/hir Health Info Libr J. 2022;39:312–322. SCOPING REVIEW OF SPANISH NURSING RCTS 313 BACKGROUND Key Messages Randomised controlled clinical trials (RCTs) are important for decision-making in clinical practice and • Most randomised controlled trials (RCT) con- public health for several reasons. A RCT is a planned ducted by Spanish research teams were pub- experiment that aims to evaluate the efficacy of one or lished in journals in English language and not more health, medical or surgical interventions. They necessarily specific to nursing. are conducted with methodological rigour to assess • Nursing researchers should adhere to the the effects, benefits and harms that therapeutic inter- CONSORT statement when reporting results of ventions, drugs, devices or health techniques may RCTs to ensure methodological quality and cause in humans (Bonfill et al., 2013; Dickersin proper reporting. et al., 1994). They are considered the gold-standard • New RCTs identified in this study that were research design and have become the foundation for not available in Cochrane's CENTRAL data- systematic reviews and other evidence synthesis stud- base, were submitted through the Cochrane ies (Villanueva et al., 2018), which, in turn, are the sci- Register of Studies (CRS), therefore improving entific cornerstone for health care decision-making availability, identification in electronic litera- (Sackett et al., 1996). ture searches, and potential inclusion in evi- As described in multiple studies (Arevalo-Rodriguez dence synthesis studies. et al., 2018; Gutarra-Vilchez et al., 2016; Loezar • Further identification of RCTs in nursing con- et al., 2018; Martí et al., 1999; Villanueva et al., 2018) ducted by Spanish teams may require hand- identifying RCTs is challenging for three main reasons: searching non-indexed journals in nursing and the term RCT was included in the major health science other medical fields. databases (MEDLINE and EMBASE) in the 1990s; previous studies may be indexed under wider categories. In addi- tion, these databases include primarily English-language journals, representing a potential dissemination bias of studies published in Spanish. Finally, the study method- OBJECTIVES ology is not always clear enough, making it difficult to identify and index a study as an RCT. The aim of this study was to identify and assess the main Nursing, like all health science disciplines, must be characteristics and sources of bias in nursing RCTs con- based on scientific evidence. Although scientific produc- ducted by Spanish research teams. tion has increased significantly in recent years (Adams et al., 2018; Baldi et al., 2014; Devos et al., 2018; Guo et al., 2014; Hodgson et al., 2014; Munday et al., 2020; METHODS Pham et al., 2021) it remains low compared to other disci- plines (Alonso Coello et al., 2004; Jiménez Hernandez A scoping review consisting of a systematic and compre- et al., 2007). hensive search of RCTs in nursing was carried out. The Several studies have identified and analysed the selected articles were analysed descriptively, and a risk of methodological quality of nursing-related RCTs in bias assessment was performed. English in areas such as paediatrics, wound management An electronic search was conducted in three major or oncology (Adams et al., 2018; Baldi et al., 2014; databases: MEDLINE (PubMed), Cumulative Index for Cullum, 1997; Devos et al., 2018; Guo et al., 2014; Nursing and Allied Health Literature (CINAHL, EBSCO- Hodgson et al., 2014; Munday et al., 2020). To our knowl- host) and Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials edge, no similar studies have been conducted for nursing (CENTRAL), with no starting date restrictions, and up to RCTs published in Spanish or by authors from Spanish October 2021 (updated search). The search strategy is institutions. Also, being aware of this body of evidence is presented in Appendix A. relevant in that it may lead to a better understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of these studies, as well as of the most appropriate approaches and strategies to Eligibility criteria identify them when conducting evidence synthesis stud- ies (Neimann Rasmussen & Montgomery, 2018; • RCTs, as defined by the Cochrane Collaboration Pardo, 2017; Stern & Kleijnen, 2020). (J. [Ed] Higgins & Green, 2011): 314 MEDINA-AEDO ET AL. 1. trials that include human subjects only; randomisa- Ethical considerations tion units could be individuals, groups, organs, or body parts; Due to the nature of the study and the fact that it did not 2. the study must be prospective; deal with patient personal data, ethics committee 3. studies that compared two or more treatments or approval was not required. interventions with each other (one of which may be a control/placebo or no treatment group); 4. studies in which treatment allocation is randomised Data analysis and/or blinded (blinding of patients, health care staff or outcome assessors). A descriptive analysis of the data was performed. Quantita- • Study led by nurses or other nursing care professionals tive variables were described with central tendency and dis- in any setting (primary care, hospital, community, persion measures. Qualitative variables were described with schools, universities, residential or day centres) and in relative and absolute frequencies and percentages. Data any population. were processed using the statistical package SPSS© (v.25). • Research in which the first author or contact author is affiliated to a Spanish institution (university, research centre, hospital, etc.). Validity and reliability/rigour • Studies not meeting any of these criteria were excluded. The search strategy was designed by an experienced researcher from the Iberoamerican Cochrane Centre (CCIb) (Barcelona, Spain). Study selection and data Data collection extraction were done in duplicate and independently by two researchers. Researchers received training in data The selection of studies was carried out in two phases: a extraction and risk of bias assessment of RCTs and were first screening of titles and abstracts of the retrieved refer- assisted during the process of data collection. Check for ences, independently by two investigators. Eligible studies discrepancies in the extracted data was carried out by were then reviewed in full text, focusing on the methods two authors who were blinded with regards to the data section, also in duplicate and independently by two investi- collection researchers. To do so, they examined the corre- gators. In both cases, discrepancies were resolved by con- sponding RCTs or addressed the people in charge of the sensus or by consulting another investigator. data extraction. Finally, the risk of bias assessment was For each eligible RCT we recorded the following done using an adapted version of the Cochrane Collabo- information: author name, year of publication, study ration's risk of bias assessment tool (RoB assessment tool) title, journal name, study objective and type, scope, year (J. P. T. Higgins et al., 2011). of study start and end, and number, age and sex of partic- ipants, and number of dropouts or missing. For the jour- nals that published eligible RCTs, we recorded the RESULTS following: country, main language, indexing databases, impact factor, quartile, and open access publication sta- The study was conducted between November 2018 (proto- tus. We also revised the author guidelines for RCTs on col and first search) and October 2021 (updated search). each journal website to determine whether they explicitly The electronic search yielded 3391 articles published stated their adherence to CONSORT (Schulz et al., 2010). between 1989 and October 2021. After removing duplicates To establish these characteristics, the Journal Citation (n = 593), the first screening (by title and abstract) identi- Report (JCR) and Matriz de informacion para el an alisis fied 474 potential RCTs. Following full-text assessment, de revistas (MIAR) were consulted (Equipo MIAR, 2021). 199 RCTs in nursing were finally included (see Figure 1). All extracted data were input into an Excel spreadsheet. For the overall risk of bias, five domains from the Cochrane Collaboration ROB tool were assessed: sequence Characteristics of the identified journals randomisation, random sequence concealment, blinding of personnel and/or participants, blinding of outcome assess- The 199 RCTs identified were published in 122 different ment and reporting reasons for missing data, as well as the journals, of which 82.1% (n = 101) are journals that pub- percentage of missing data for all intervention groups. To lish original articles in English and 17.9% (n = 22) in classify the overall risk as high, low, or unclear, the authors Spanish. Of the total number of journals analysed, 87.7% created a flow chart for each domain. (n = 107) were listed in the Journal Citation Report SCOPING REVIEW OF SPANISH NURSING RCTS 315 F I G U R E 1 PRISMA flowchart for the process of identifying and selecting the studies included in this review [Colour figure can be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com] (JCR) and 22.1% (n = 27) were open access journals. active under this name. Figure 2 shows the trend in pub- Thirty-two journals (26.2%) were classified under JCR lished nursing-related RCTs from 1993 to 2021 in 4-year nursing category. Regarding adherence to CONSORT, periods. Over time, there was an increasing trend in the 66.4% (n = 81) explicitly stated in their guidelines that publication of RCTs in nursing, and a mean of seven arti- authors should use the CONSORT checklist for RCT cles was published per year. 2014 and 2015, and 2018 reporting (Schulz et al., 2010). accounted for the publication of most RCTs in nursing. The three countries with the highest number of jour- Along with the sustained increase in the number of nals containing nursing RCTs were the United States publications, the percentage of RCTs published in (n = 42; 34.1%), the United Kingdom (n = 38; 30.9%) and English-language journals also increased. The period Spain (n = 21; 17.1%). Five (23.8%) of the Spanish jour- between 2019 and 2021 had the highest percentage of nals were not indexed in MEDLINE and just 52.4% (n = 11) studies published in English (89.2%) (see Figure 3). could be found in Journal Citation Reports (JCR). Half of the RCTs published were multicentre studies Twenty-nine percent (n = 6) of the Spanish journals and (n = 100, 50.3%). The most common settings where RCTs 29% (n = 11) of the UK journals were open access. were conducted were hospitals (n = 88, 44.2%) and primary The Spanish journal Enfermería Clínica published the care centres (n = 69, 34.2%). The age of participants was highest number of nursing RCTs, at 14 (7.0%). The journal reported in 88.9% (n = 177) of the selected RCTs. Regarding with the highest impact factor in which an eligible RCT gender, women accounted for 54.2% (n = 40,961) of the was published was the British Medical Journal, with an total number of participants. impact factor of 30.313 (JCR) (see Table 1 for more details). The mean length of the studies was 1.41 years (SD = 1.24) and the mean time between study comple- tion and publication was 2.78 years (SD = 1.66). Of all Characteristics of the randomised the eligible studies, 92.5% (n = 184) compared the inter- controlled trials vention with an explicit control group identifiable in the article, 4.5% (n = 9) compared their main intervention to The oldest RCT identified was a 1993 publication in the a second type of intervention not identified as a control journal ‘Tubercle and Lung Disease’ which is no longer group or compared with doing nothing, and in 3.0% 316 TABLE 1 Characteristics of identified journals, by country (n = 122)a Language (%) Indexed (%) Included Open CONSORT Journal country n (%) English Spanish MEDLINE SCOPUS EMBASE CINAHL SCIE DOAJ DIALNET in JCR (%) access (%) adherence (%) Australia 2 (1,6) 100 100 100 100 100 100 0 0 100 0 100 Brazil 1 (0,8) 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 0 100 100 100 Canada 2 (1,6) 100 100 100 100 50 100 100 0 100 100 0 France 1 (0,8) 100 100 100 100 0 100 100 0 100 100 100 Germany 3 (2,5) 100 100 100 100 100 100 0 0 100 0 0 Ireland 3 (2,5) 100 100 100 100 66.7 100 0 0 100 0 100 New Zealand 2 (1,6) 100 100 100 100 0 100 50.0 0 100 50.0 50.0 Spain 21 (17,2) 100 76.2 90.5 81.0 42.9 52.4 28.6 100 52.4 28.6 71.4 Switzerland 3 (2,5) 100 100 66.7 66.7 0 66.7 66.7 0 66.7 66.7 100 The Netherlands 4 (3,3) 100 100 100 100 50.0 100 0 0 100 0 25.0 United Arab Emirates 1 (0,8) 100 100 100 100 0 0 0 0 0 0 100 United Kingdom 38 (31,1) 100 100 97.4 97.4 84.2 97.4 28.9 5.3 100.0 28.9 73.7 United States 41 (33,6) 100 97.6 97.6 95.1 85.4 87.8 4.9 26.8 92.7 4.9 61.0 of America a Total number of journals = 122. The percentage in each cell is calculated for the total per country. Note: The bold values in the "n" column are the three countries of origin of the largest number of journals.Bold values on the final column (CONSORT Adherence), indicates the adherence to CONSORT statement of the journals of the three countries that published the most of the RCTs (Schulz et al., 2010). MEDINA-AEDO ET AL. SCOPING REVIEW OF SPANISH NURSING RCTS 317 FIGURE 2 Number of RCTs published between 1993 and 2021 in 4-year intervals FIGURE 3 Number of RCTs published between 1993 and 2021 in 4-year intervals according to the publication language of the journal (n = 6) of the studies it was not possible to identify the percent (n = 133) of the RCTs explicitly reported their comparator or it was not reported in the articles. One- funding sources, and of these 93.2% (n = 124) of them hundred-nineteen (59.8%) of the RCTs implemented edu- were funded by public institutions (government research cational or information interventions. Various health funds, European funds, universities etc.) problems were studied, being cardiovascular diseases the Regarding the risk of bias assessment, 32.7% (n = 65) most frequently studied (11.1%; n = 22), followed by geri- of the studies had a high overall risk of bias and 33.7% atric health problems (10.1%; n = 20), mental health (n = 67) had a low overall risk of bias. Further details of (7.0%, n = 14) and obesity and malnutrition (5.5%, the mentioned assessment are shown in Figure 4. Blind- n = 11). See Table 2 for further details. ing of participants/personnel had a high risk of bias in Table 3 shows the reporting of conflict of interest 60.3% (n = 120) of the studies. The research team consid- along with the type of funding of the studies. Sixty-seven ered that 19.1% (n = 38) of the interventions in those 318 MEDINA-AEDO ET AL. TABLE 2 Characteristics of the RCTs identified (n = 199) T A B L E 3 Conflicts of interest and type of funding reported in identified studies (n = 199) n % N participants 75,571 100.0 Category n % Women 40,961 54.2 Conflict of interest Mean SD Range Reported conflict 9 4.5 Reported no conflict 124 62.3 Age (years) 55.5 21.0 0–92 Not reported 66 33.2 Duration of RCT (years) 1.4 1.2 0–10 Type of funding Type of study n % Reported public funding 119 59.8 Unicentric 99 49.7 Reported private funding 13 6.5 Multicentre 100 50.3 Not reported 67 33.7 Setting n % Hospital 88 44.2 Primary care 69 34.2 studies were deemed as high risk of bias and most of the Home care 17 8.5 studies did not blind participants or personnel. Regarding School/University 8 4.0 the journals, a majority of them focused on medical fields Long-stay centres 6 3.0 other than nursing and were published in English. Emergency department 5 2.5 Only one fifth of the identified journals were classi- Day centres 3 1.5 fied within the JCR category of nursing, which means that a high proportion of RCTs in nursing are published Other 1 0.5 in journals related to other fields. Possible explanations Comparison in control may include that journals in other fields, for example, group n % general medicine, have a higher impact factor. Reader- Standard care 137 68.8 ship of those journals may also be higher than that of nurs- Placebo 10 5.0 ing journals (Villanueva et al., 2018). For this reason, when Other 37 18.6 identifying RCTs in nursing, it may be advisable to incor- None 9 4.5 porate broad searching strategies and to search at least two Not reported 6 3.0 different types of databases. One of them should be specia- lised in RCTs indexation in any field (e.g., CENTRAL) and Type of intervention n % the other one in nursing (e.g., CINAHL) to retrieve litera- Educational and 119 59.8 ture published in nursing journals and other medical fields. information In our study, we have searched a RCTs database Other 29 14.6 (CENTRAL), a nursing database (CINAHL) and a general Medicines 18 9.0 health science database (PubMed) with the aim of covering Rehabilitation 16 8.0 as many different types as possible of journals. Devices/equipment 15 7.5 Most of the journals where the identified RCTs were published are edited in English. This pattern seemed to Chemotherapy 1 0.5 increase over time, as half of all eligible RCTs over the last Surgery 1 0.5 8 years (n = 80; 50.3%) were published in journals edited in English. A plausible hypothesis may be that journals in English are likely to have a higher impact factor and studies could have been blinded and the remaining 41.2% broader readership (Villanueva et al., 2018) and therefore, (n = 82) would have been impossible to blind. more attractive to local authors (Loezar et al., 2018; Villanueva et al., 2018). Our study incorporated only elec- tronic searches in literature databases where journals are DISC USS I ON indexed. We did not search local or international journals where RCTs could be published and that were not indexed In this study, we identified 199 RCTs conducted by Spanish in databases, hence not searchable via electronic strategies. research teams in nursing published in 122 journals. Most When trying to comprehensive identify the scientific out- of these studies were completed in hospital or primary care put in fields like nursing from non-English speaking coun- settings and received public funding. One third of the tries, it may be advisable to incorporate handsearching, SCOPING REVIEW OF SPANISH NURSING RCTS 319 FIGURE 4 Risk of bias assessment of the identified studies (n = 199) particularly of local journals (Armstrong et al., 2005; (low, high or unclear risk of bias). In our study, the pro- Hopewell et al., 2007). cess of personnel or participants blinding was the least Of all the identified journals (n = 122), 33.6% fulfilled domain, similar to the evaluations in other stud- (n = 41) did not explicitly state that they adhered to ies of methodological assessment of RCTs in nursing CONSORT recommendations for the reporting of RCTs. (Munday et al., 2020; Pham et al., 2021), and in trends of This becomes relevant, for instance, in aspects such as RCTs in general (Vinkers et al., 2021). This may be due the title, which should clearly identify the study as an to the fact that most commonly studied interventions RCT. Nonadherence could obstruct the identification of were educational, and their inherent nature makes them these studies; suboptimal reporting quality may also have very difficult to blind (Guo et al., 2014; Loezar a direct effect on methodological quality assessment et al., 2018; Vinkers et al., 2021). However, an in-depth (Arevalo-Rodriguez et al., 2018). Incorporating the CON- analysis of this characteristic showed that almost 20% of SORT checklist as a requirement for publication of RCTs the RCTs could have blinded both personnel and/or par- strengthens research the transparency and quality, and ticipants, hence reducing the risk of bias. facilitates the critical appraisal of this type of research To our knowledge, this is the first study to analyse design (Blanco et al., 2018; Turner et al., 2012). published RCTs in nursing conducted by Spanish Interestingly, almost a quarter of the Spanish journals research teams. The implementation of a screening strat- identified were not indexed in MEDLINE and almost half of egy conducted by two experienced researchers increased them did not appear in JCR. Even though the impact fac- the probability of including a large number of RCTs. The tor of these journals was not obtained, there may be a electronic search was carried out in three large health- perception that local journals have a more limited reach science databases: MEDLINE (PubMed), CINAHL and or prestige than international journals (Loezar CENTRAL, ensuring a broad scope. et al., 2018). Journals could publish articles in Spanish A limitation of our study is that there are other filters and in English in order to broaden reach and readership. available for searching studies from Spain that we did not Over the 29 years studied, a mean value of seven incorporate (Valderas et al., 2006). We trust that the mul- RCTs related to nursing were published per year, a rate tipronged search strategy that we used allowed us to somewhat higher than in other disciplines such as phys- overcome this limitation. Future studies could incorpo- iotherapy or orthopaedics and trauma (Arevalo- rate this (Valderas et al., 2006) and other filters to better Rodriguez et al., 2018; Turrillas et al., 2017). The number understand the searching process of these kinds of of RCTs published in nursing has increased over time, studies. being highest during the last 11 years (2011–2021). This Our study shows that, if performed in more than one finding is in line with the trends in RCTs publication database electronic searches may not be as limited in growth in general, where some authors found a 138% of retrieving RCTs conducted by Spanish teams as other growth, especially in the last decade (2010–2021). authors have suggested (Gutarra-Vilchez et al., 2016; The overall risk of bias assessment of the identified Martí et al., 1999). However, additional handsearching in RCTs found similar proportions for the three categories non-indexed journals may still be warranted; this is 320 MEDINA-AEDO ET AL. perhaps the most relevant limitation of our study. In A C KN O WL ED G EME N T S order to build up a better picture of all the RCTs con- Melixa Medina-Aedo is a Ph.D. student at the Doctorate ducted by Spanish teams in nursing, it may be necessary program on Methodology of Biomedical Research and to incorporate handsearch in Spanish nursing journals Public Health, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Bar- that are not indexed in the main databases. Handsearch- celona, Spain. The authors would like to thank Guifré ing complements the valuable task conducted by infor- Bonfill, Marina Mesa, Iris Medina, and the Medical mation specialists when trying to identify RCTs. This School students at the Universitat Autònoma de Barce- would retrieve further RCTs published by Spanish lona, who actively participated in the extraction of data research teams regardless of the indexing status of the for some of the selected studies. The authors are grateful publishing journal. The Iberoamerican Cochrane Centre to Victoria Leo for her proofreading and improving the has carried out similar projects to date; the identified readability of this manuscript and to Josefina Bendersky RCTs were submitted to CENTRAL, the Cochrane Col- for her help submitting RCTs to CENTRAL. laboration's controlled trials database (Arevalo-Rodriguez et al., 2018; Gutarra-Vilchez et al., 2016; Loezar F U N D I N G IN F O R M A T I O N et al., 2018; Martí et al., 1999; Sanclemente et al., 2015; This study did not receive any funding. Turrillas et al., 2017; Villanueva et al., 2018) As a result, RCTs published in non-indexed journals have been given CONFLICT OF INTEREST greater visibility (Pardo-Hernandez et al., 2017). In our Nothing to declare. study, the newly identified RCTs not included in CEN- TRAL were submitted to this database through the ORCID Cochrane Register of Studies (CRS), which works as a Melixa Medina-Aedo https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9922- data management tool and a data repository. The submis- 464X sion was successfully completed using the Iberoamerican Cristian Segura-Carrillo https://orcid.org/0000-0002- Center's journals and trials database (BADERI) following 5970-8121 methodology published elsewhere (Pardo-Hernandez et al., 2017). As a result, the availability and identification TWI TT ER in electronic literature searches of these RCTs have been Melixa Medina-Aedo @NediMeli enhanced, as well as the possibility of inclusion in evi- Elena Torralba-Martinez @ElenaTorralba6 dence synthesis studies. Cristian Segura-Carrillo @crisegurap Future research could assess the degree of adherence to Diana Buitrago-García @dianacarbg the CONSORT checklist (Schulz et al., 2010). 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Health Information & Libraries Journal, 35(3), 192–201. https://doi.org/10.1111/hir.12214 Vinkers, C. H., Lamberink, H. J., Tijdink, J. K., Heus, P., Bouter, L., For Nursing: TI nurs* OR AB nurs* Glasziou, P., Moher, D., Damen, J. A., Hooft, L., & Otte, W. M. For Spanish research teams: AU Spain OR AU (2021). The methodological quality of 176,620 randomized con- Espana OR AU España OR Spain OR Espana OR España trolled trials published between 1966 and 2018 reveals a posi- For Randomised controlled trials: PT randomised tive trend but also an urgent need for improvement. PLoS controlled trial OR PT controlled clinical trial OR TI ran- Biology, 19(4), 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio. domised OR TI placebo OR MW drug therapy OR AB 3001162 randomly OR TI trial OR AB trial OR AB groups NOT MH animals NOT MH humans http://search.ebscohost.com.are.uab.cat/login.aspx? How to cite this article: Medina-Aedo, M., direct=true&db=ccm&bquery=((TI+nurs*)+OR+( Torralba-Martinez, E., Segura-Carrillo, C., AB+nurs*))+AND+((AU+Spain)+OR+( Buitrago-García, D., Solà, I., Pardo-Hernandez, H., AU+Espana)+OR+(AU+Espa%26%23241%3ba)+OR+( & Bonfill, X. (2022). Finding and evaluating Spain)+OR+(Espana)+OR+(Espa%26%23241% randomised controlled trials in nursing conducted 3ba))+AND+(( by Spanish research teams: A scoping review. PT+randomized+controlled+trial)+OR+( Health Information & Libraries Journal, 39(4), PT+controlled+clinical+trial)+OR+( 312–322. https://doi.org/10.1111/hir.12464 TI+randomized)+OR+(TI+placebo)+OR+( MW+drug+therapy)+OR+(AB+randomly)+OR+( TI+trial)+OR+(AB+trial)+OR+(AB+groups)+NOT+( MH+animals)+NOT+(MH+humans))&lang=es&type= A P P EN D I X A 1&searchMode=Standard&site=ehost-live A.1 | SEARCH STRATEGIES A.1.1. | Search strategy for MEDLINE A.1.3. | Search strategy for CENTRAL For Nursing: #1 nurs*tiab (nurs*[tiab] OR ‘Nursing’[Mesh] OR ‘Nursing Staff’ #2 [mh nursing] [Mesh] OR ‘Nursing Care’[Mesh] OR ‘Evidence-Based #3 [mh ‘nursing staff’] Nursing’[Mesh] OR ‘nursing’ [Subheading]) #4 [mh ‘nursing care’] For Spanish research teams: #5 [mh ‘evidence based nursing’] AND (Spain[ad] OR ‘Spain’[Mesh] OR Espana #6 #1 OR #2 OR #3 OR #4 OR #5 [ad] OR España[ad] OR Spain[tiab]) #7 spain OR españa OR espana For randomised controlled trials: #8 #6 AND #7