Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2013 Sep 6:347:f5248.
doi: 10.1136/bmj.f5248.

"Hardly worth the effort"? Medical journals' policies and their editors' and publishers' views on trial registration and publication bias: quantitative and qualitative study

Elizabeth Wager  1 , Peter Williams; Project Overcome failure to Publish nEgative fiNdings Consortium
Affiliations

"Hardly worth the effort"? Medical journals' policies and their editors' and publishers' views on trial registration and publication bias: quantitative and qualitative study

Elizabeth Wager et al. BMJ. .

Abstract

Objectives: To determine the proportion of medical journals requiring trial registration and to understand their reasons for adopting (or not adopting) such policies and other measures designed to reduce publication bias.

Design: Quantitative study of journals' instructions to authors (in June 2012) and qualitative study of editors' and publishers' views on trial registration and publication bias (carried out in Autumn 2012).

Setting: Random selection of 200 medical journals publishing clinical trials identified from the Cochrane CENTRAL database.

Participants: Editors (n=13) and publishers (n=3) of journals with different policies on trial registration (and with recently changed policies) identified from the survey of their instructions to authors.

Results: Only 55/200 journals (28%) required trial registration according to their instructions and a further three (2%) encouraged it. The editors and publishers interviewed explained their journals' reluctance to require registration in terms of not wanting to lose out to rival journals, not wanting to reject otherwise sound articles or submissions from developing countries, and perceptions that such policies were not relevant to all journals. Some interviewees considered that registration was unnecessary for small or exploratory studies.

Conclusions: Although many major medical journals state that they will only publish clinical trials that have been prospectively registered, and such policies have been associated with a dramatic increase in the number of trials being registered, most smaller journals have not adopted such policies. Editors and publishers may be reluctant to require registration because they do not understand its benefits or because they fear that adopting such a policy would put their journal at a disadvantage to competitors.

PubMed Disclaimer

Conflict of interest statement

Competing interests: All authors have completed the ICMJE uniform disclosure form at www.icmje.org/coi_disclosure.pdf (available on request from the corresponding author) and declare: EW and PW had support from the European Union for the submitted work; they have no financial relationships with any organisations that might have an interest in the submitted work in the previous three years; EW is a member of the advisory board of the International Standard Randomised Controlled Trial Number (ISRCTN) scheme, this is an unpaid position; she was also a member of the World Health Organization Scientific Advisory Group on trial registration (2005-07) and received expenses to attend occasional meetings; she acts as a paid consultant to several journal publishers.

Comment in

References

    1. Tramèr MR, Reynolds DJM, Moore RA, McQuay HJ. Impact of covert duplicate publication on meta-analysis: a case study. BMJ 1997;315:635-40. - PMC - PubMed
    1. Melander H, Ahlqvist-Rastad J, Meijer G, Beermann B. Evidence b(i)ased medicine—selective reporting from studies sponsored by pharmaceutical industry: review of studies in new drug applications. BMJ 2003;326:1171-3. - PMC - PubMed
    1. Hopewell S, Loudon K, Clarke M, Oxman A, Dickersin K. Publication bias in clinical trials due to statistical significance or direction of trial results. Cochrane Database Syst Rev 2009;21(1):MR000006. - PMC - PubMed
    1. De Angelis C, Drazen JM, Frizelle FA, Haug C, Hoey J, Horton R, et al. Clinical trial registration: a statement from the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors. Lancet 2004;364:911-2. - PubMed
    1. Simes RJ. Publication bias: the case for an international registry of clinical trials. J Clin Oncol 1986;4:1529-41. - PubMed

Publication types