Correctly reporting the results of a clinical trial – even if they don’t match what researchers have initially sought to find – is a basic rule of most reputable medical journals but it may be they are breaking those rules, according to a report by Jocelyn Kaiser in Science magazine.
“Editors and researchers routinely misunderstand what correct trial reporting looks like,” project leader Ben Goldacre, an author and physician at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom and a proponent of transparency in drug research told Science.
Goldacre and his team’s Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine Outcome Monitoring Project (COMPare) looked at clinical trials published over 6 weeks in Annals of Internal Medicine, The BMJ, JAMA, The Lancet, and The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), all of which claim to abide by the Consolidated Standards of Reporting Trials (CONSORT) guidelines, which includes a rule that authors share the outcomes they intend to study prior to the start and stick with it when it comes time to publish the details.
Science reports that according to the COMPare team, only nine of 67 trials published in the journals reported accurate outcomes. The COMPare team shared their findings with the journals in writing but 23 of the 58 letters were published. Annals and The BMJ published all of them, The Lancet accepted 80%, and NEJM and JAMA rejected them all, Science reported.
