Blog

The first evaluation to cite an entry within a trial registry

We have recently published our first evaluation that cites an entry within a trial registry. Perhaps we're too geeky for words, but for us this represents an elegant stitching together of the many elements that make up contemporary scientific publishing.

It used to be that scientific publishing was all about research articles. These days we've become accustomed to review articles, often useful as a way to bring together the main references in a field, and commentaries, a good way to highlight the key lessons of a research article or raise an important issue.

Faculty of 1000 Medicine is part of the so-called 'post-publication' world, where 'publication' refers to the traditional publishing of research articles. But there is also a growing 'pre-publication' world -- usually consisting of preprint servers and (the aforementioned) trial registries.

Our evaluation by Philip Harvey is of a paper by RW Buchanan et al. from the American Journal of Psychiatry. In his evaluation, Philip highlights how the paper builds on some unpublished work that he has come across. Since the work is unpublished, in the bad old days, its details would have been irretrievable. But, because the study was registered in ClinicalTrials.gov, we can learn what was done to which population and whom to contact to find out more.

So, through F1000 Medicine, not only do you learn of a key published article and what a respected leader thinks of it but also of other relevant work as yet unpublished. Okay, we're geeks, but that's actually quite cool.

Save to del.icio.us | Email this

Posted by Pritpal S Tamber on Friday Feb 22, 2008, Category: General | Permalink