Research methods and reporting

Nearly 15 years ago Doug Altman, the BMJ’s senior statistical adviser and professor of medical statistics, asked in this journal, “What should we think about researchers who use the wrong techniques (either wilfully or in ignorance), use the right techniques wrongly, misinterpret their results, report their results selectively, cite the literature selectively, and draw unjustified conclusions? We should be appalled. Yet numerous studies of the medical literature, in both general and specialist journals, have shown that all of the above phenomena are common.”1

Things may have improved somewhat since then, but we still have much to do. Like most other medical journal editors, we at the BMJ continue to be dismayed by submissions that describe poorly conducted studies and by reports of apparently adequate studies that are so incomplete and confusingly written that they are impossible to appraise. Many of these unsatisfactory articles come from well resourced countries, …