BMJ  2005;331:638 (17 September), doi:10.1136/bmj.331.7517.638-a

Letter

Review of publication bias in studies on publication bias

Here's a proposal for editors that may help reduce publication bias

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

Editor—Publication bias is a pervasive problem in biomedical research,¹ Dubben and Beck-Bornholdt providing further evidence on its importance.² The preference for publishing papers with significant results may seriously compromise the ability to draw valid conclusions from the published literature. This problem seems particularly relevant to results from epidemiological research.

We offer a solution to this problem that lies at the disposal of journal editors. Preliminary editorial decisions could be based solely on the peer review of the introduction and methods sections of submitted papers. These two sections deal with the key issues on which editorial decisions would ideally be based: the importance of the research question and the potential for the study design and proposed analyses to inform that question.

Blinding reviewers to the results and discussion sections may pose some challenges to the reviewing process because elements of these later sections are also relevant for editorial decisions. However, these . . . [Full text of this article]

mglymour@hsph.harvard.edu

Department of Society, Human Development and Health, Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, MA 02215, USA

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