Call for Comments on a Proposal To Improve Reporting of Clinical Trials in the Biomedical Literature

Published guidelines for reporting clinical-research data range from the succinct paragraph on statistics in the “Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals” [1] to articles of differing detail [2-7] and books written for the clinical researcher [8-10]. Despite such excellent resources in the biomedical literature, neither investigators reporting clinical trials nor journal editors selecting reports of trials for publication follow those guidelines consistently. For this reason, a working group of medical journal editors, biostatisticians, researchers, and editors from biomedical institutions met to consider how reporting of clinical-trials data might be made more consistent and complete. The group proposed that 1) editors of journals publishing reports of clinical trials are the persons best positioned to promote better reporting by investigators submitting papers to their journals, and 2) a readily accessible guide to the most basic methodologic elements required in reports of clinical trials could be …