News

A number of commentaries introducing new CONSORT 2010 have been published; we would like to highlight the article by Prof Hywel Williams:
Williams HC. Cars, CONSORT 2010, and Clinical Practice. Trials 2010, 11:33

Another interesting editorial was published by the editors of the European Journal of Clinical Investigation. It discusses the problems of papers resubmitted for publication that have already been peer reviewed but ignore the provided comments. Using examples from their own journal, the editors alert to the questionable practices of some authors and discuss these in much broader context of the general peer review issues.
Ioannidis JP, Tatsioni A, Karassa FB: Who is afraid of reviewers' comments? Or, why anything can be published and anything can be cited. Eur J Clin Invest 2010, 40:285-287.

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Editorial by Sorensen and Rothman (1) discusses the quality of prognosis research and a registration of observational studies. The suggestion to register observational studies was made by Hemingway and colleagues (2) and recently discussed in the BMJ editorial (3).

1. Sorensen HT, Rothman KJ. The prognosis for research. BMJ 2010;340:c703. PMID:20164129
2. Hemingway H, Riley RD, Altman DG. Ten steps towards improving prognosis research. BMJ 2009;339:b4184.
3. Loder E, Groves T, MacAuley D. Registration of observational studies. BMJ 2010;340:c950

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The article by David Grimes and colleagues highlights problems of using surrogate end points that lack validation and asks journals to consider warning their readers about the hidden dangers.
Grimes DA, Schulz KF, Raymond EG. Surrogate end points in women's health research: science, protoscience, and pseudoscience. Fertil Steril 2010 Apr;93(6):1731-4. PMID:20153470

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A research study carried out by Kirkham and colleagues examined the prevalence of outcome reporting bias and its impact on Cochrane reviews. The outcome reporting bias, which happens when only a subset of the originally recorded outcome variables is selected for publication on the basis of obtained results, is an under-recognised problem that affects the conclusions in a substantial proportion of Cochrane reviews.
The article alerts systematic reviewers to this problem and offers a nine point classification system for missing outcome data in randomised trials (ORBIT).
Kirkham JJ, Dwan KM, Altman DG, Gamble C, Dodd S, Smyth R, et al. The impact of outcome reporting bias in randomised controlled trials on a cohort of systematic reviews. BMJ 2010;340:c365. PMID:20156912