Pautas de chequeo, parte i: Consort y trend*

Cheklists, part I: CONSORT and TREND One of the most common problems in scientific articles is its poor reporting, a situation that leads to lack of information, affecting internal and external validity, questioning his contribution and usefulness. This has been studied leading to propositions by the international scientific community, reflected in a series of guidelines or checklists as CONSORT and TREND for randomized clinical trials (RCTs) and non-randomized intervention studies (NRISs) respectively. The CONSORT checklist was created in 1996, with a final version in 2010, consisting of 25 items, grouped into 6 domains: Title and Summary, Introduction, Methods, Results, Discussion, and Other information; representing the critical points in a RCT report. In many cases RCTs are no feasible so other research designs such as NRISs has to be executed, for this design the TREND checklist was developed in 2004, consisting of 22 items, grouped into 5 domains: Title and Summary, Introduction, Methods, Results and Discussion. Even when the evidence has been contradictory regarding the impact of these checklists, they represent an important tool to improve biomedical research. This article tries to explain these checklists and encourage its use by the authors of the Revista Chilena de Cirugía, in function to contribute to continuous improvement of their articles in a simple and efficient way.