Looking back: editors' pick of 2008

Editorial decisions are often considered to be a source of publication bias, simply because editors seem to favour manuscripts with positive or significant results. Critics of this approach argue (justifiably, in our view) that negative or non-significant findings in clinical pharmacology studies can be equally important to funding bodies, researchers and study participants, provided the study is sufficiently powered to exclude a biologically meaningful difference between active and comparator. (It is for this reason that we favour presenting the difference together with its 95% confidence interval for important negative findings.) A frustrated scientist once complained that he would spend months fruitlessly testing a particular molecule, only to discover, in a conversation with another group, that previous studies (unpublished) had been consistently negative. Why waste resources on further developing and experimenting with interventions where the available evidence indicates little prospect of clinical utility?