Editorial: Clinical Trial Registration – Using Empirical Data to Inform Journal of Pediatric Psychology’s Policy

Over the past several years, there has been increasing attention to transparency in the conduct of and reporting of clinical trials. This is for good reason. We know that a great deal of waste occurs in resources when clinical trials are conducted but the results are not reported or published, and, that there can be significant biases in the results that do make it into a published evaluation (Chan et  al., 2014;Glasziou et  al., 2014;Simera et  al., 2010). For example, an investigator may choose to only report statistically significant outcomes in an attempt to make a treatment appear more efficacious and to increase likelihood of publication of the findings. This type of selective reporting has consequences for the health care providers working in that field as well as on consumers and policy makers who are not able to easily interpret the evidence base and make decisions about treatments. For these reasons, the use of publicly accessible trial registries has been mandated as a condition of funding by some agencies such as the National Institutes of Health and as a condition of publication by many journals per recommendations of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (DeAngelis et al., 2004).
Source: Journal of Pediatric Psychology - Category: Pediatrics Source Type: research