October 28, 2005

Open-Access Journal Will Publish Results of Small Clinical Trials That Usually Go Unreported

By LILA GUTERMAN

BIAS BE GONE: For years, editors and researchers have worried that many clinical trials never appear in the medical literature. The human studies most likely to go unreported are small trials, ones that reach negative conclusions, and ones that don't achieve statistical significance. As a result, the research literature suffers from what editors call "publication bias."

How can the literature become more representative of the research that's being done? The answer is simple, say some,