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Table 1 Criteria for a judgement of high risk of bias due to selective reporting in the Cochrane risk of bias tool for randomised trials (2011 version)

From: Rethinking the assessment of risk of bias due to selective reporting: a cross-sectional study

Any one of the following: (1) not all of the study’s pre-specified primary outcomes have been reported; (2) one or more outcomes of interest in the review are reported incompletely so that they cannot be entered in a meta-analysis; (3) the study report fails to include results for a key outcome that would be expected to have been reported for such a study; (4) one or more primary outcomes is reported using measurements, analysis methods or subsets of the data (e.g. subscales) that were not pre-specified, or; (5) one or more reported primary outcomes were not pre-specified (unless clear justification for their reporting is provided, such as an unexpected adverse event). We consider criteria 1–3 examples of outcome non-reporting bias and criteria 4–5 examples of bias in selection of the reported result.