History
Randomized experiments first appeared in psychology, where they were introduced by Charles Sanders Peirce, and in education. Later, randomized experiments appeared in agriculture, due to Jerzy Neyman and Ronald A. Fisher. Fisher's experimental research and his writings popularized randomized experiments.
The first published RCT appeared in the 1948 paper entitled "Streptomycin treatment of pulmonary tuberculosis", which described a Medical Research Council investigation. One of the authors of that paper was Austin Bradford Hill, who is credited as having conceived the modern RCT.
By the late 20th century, RCTs were recognized as the standard method for "rational therapeutics" in medicine. As of 2004, more than 150,000 RCTs were in the Cochrane Library. To improve the reporting of RCTs in the medical literature, an international group of scientists and editors published Consolidated Standards of Reporting Trials (CONSORT) Statements in 1996, 2001, and 2010 which have become widely accepted. Randomization is the processs of assigning trial subjects to treatment or control groups using an element of chance to determine the assignments in order to reduce the bias.
Read more about this topic: Randomized Controlled Trial
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