Joel Ray and Marian Vermeulen highlight the existence of misspellings of medical terms in Medline.1 A problem also exists with methodological terms. Perhaps the most important of these for someone interested in patient care or the preparation of a systematic review is the truncated free text “random*,” which might identify reports of randomised trials. We searched Medline for some common misspellings of random to identify how often they occur and whether the retrieved records could have been …