The effects of aroma inhalation on the quality of sleep, professional quality of life, and near-misses in medication errors among emergency room nurses on night duty in Korea: a randomized controlled

In the field of nursing in Korea, quasi-experimental research has been frequently conducted to evaluate interventions related to practice, education, and policy. At the journal level, the quality management of reporting such studies directly affects the credibility of research and its applicability in clinical practice. In nursing research, when randomization is not feasible due to ethical or practical constraints, quasi-experimental designs are often utilized. A quasi-experimental design is positioned between the rigor of a true experimental design—which includes at least one control group and one experimental/intervention group with random assignment []—and the flexibility of observational studies []. Quasi-experimental designs offer a practical method for evaluating intervention effects in real-world clinical and community settings. However, due to the absence of randomization, there are threats to internal validity such as selection bias. Therefore, transparency in design, analysis, and reporting is paramount [,]. In nursing and public health intervention studies, the clear reporting of intervention content, implementation context, characteristics of the comparison group, and strategies for bias adjustment plays a crucial role in the interpretation and reproducibility of research findings [,]. Incomplete reporting can lead to misunderstandings about the actual effects and limitations of interventions, which in turn can negatively affect the design of subsequent studies and policy decisions [,]. In response to these concerns, Des Jarlais et al. [] published the Transparent Reporting of Evaluations with Nonrandomized Designs (TREND) statement in 2004 with the aim of improving the completeness of reporting for nonrandomized intervention evaluation studies. The TREND statement provides a 22-item checklist covering essential elements of quasi-experimental and nonrandomized research, including study design, detailed descriptions of interventions and comparison conditions, measurement and analysis methods, and bias adjustment strategies, thereby promoting standardization of reporting []. Since its introduction, TREND has been widely cited as a benchmark for improving the reporting quality of nonrandomized evaluation studies [,].