STARD for Abstracts: essential items for reporting diagnostic accuracy studies in journal or conference abstracts.

s play a critical role in the use of research. Clinicians and researchers use abstracts to decide whether they should read the full journal article, attend the conference presentation, or contact the authors for more information. Systematic reviewers screen large amounts of abstracts to assess study eligibility. In some cases, study abstracts may be the only information available to clinicians, researchers, reviewers, guideline developers, or policy makers. In evaluations, the proportion of diagnostic accuracy studies presented as conference abstracts that are eventually reported in articles was found to be as low as 39%. We recently evaluated the quality of reporting of abstracts of diagnostic accuracy studies published in several high impact journals and abstracts presented at a major ophthalmology conference. 6 In line with previous authors, 7 we found that many of these abstracts were insufficiently informative. Key items, such as eligibility criteria, study setting, patient sampling procedures, and confidence intervals around accuracy estimates were reported in less than half of the abstracts. 6 This makes it difficult for readers to assess the validity and applicability of the study findings. Ideally, studies should be free from deficiencies, and the results of the study should reflect the “true” accuracy of the test under evaluation. Major sources of bias in diagnostic accuracy studies include methodological flaws in participant recruitment, data collection, test execution and interpretation, and data analysis. 9 Even when free of bias, study findings are not necessarily generalisable to all applications. Diagnostic accuracy can vary across studies because of variations in study setting, participant characteristics, disease prevalence and severity, and aspects of test execution and interpretation. Risk of bias and concerns about applicability can only be evaluated if study reports are sufficiently informative.