Abstract: bjective: To analyze the status trustworthiness of current qualitative studies. Methods: We systematically searched two databases (CNKI and WangFang Data) for the qualitative studies published in 5 Chinese Science Citation Database (CSCD) nursing journals in the recent 5 years. Based on the standards for reporting qualitative studies, we included and analyzed the studies meeting our inclusion criteria. Results: We obtained 389 qualitative studies and found that 94.9% of the included qualitative articles reported one or more methods to address the rigor of the research. The most common method was member check and triangulation. Compared with the standard of qualitative research reports, the current use of techniques for improving the trustworthiness of qualitative research is a literal and simple description, the reporting of techniques for improving the trustworthiness of qualitative research is not standardized, and the reporting of existing qualitative research design and data analysis methods is insufficient clear. Conclusion: Based on these issues, we illustrates the commonly used strategies for boosting trustworthiness of qualitative studies with examples. We advocate the researchers to deeply understand standards for reporting qualitative study and strategies to improve the trustworthiness to ensure that the strategies will be adopted through the whole process of the research to improve the research quality.

Key words: qualitative study; trustworthiness; reporting standards; nursing research