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IJE Advance Access published online on September 17, 2007
International Journal of Epidemiology, doi:10.1093/ije/dym168
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Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the International Epidemiological Association © The Author 2007; all rights reserved.

Editorial

Quality in epidemiological research: should we be submitting papers before we have the results and submitting more hypothesis-generating research?

Debbie A Lawlor

MRC Centre for Causal Analyses in Translational Epidemiology & Department of Social Medicine, University of Bristol, UK.

Canynge Hall, Whiteladies Road, Bristol, BS8 4SH, UK. E-mail: d.a.lawlor@bristol.ac.uk

Accepted 19 July 2007

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

All epidemiological studies, including observational epidemiology, randomized controlled trials and genetic epidemiology studies, have potential limitations. Even when studies are conducted to the highest possible quality, residual confounding might explain associations found in observational epidemiology,1 randomized trials might not be generalizable to the target population (or sub-groups),2 and genetic association studies might be affected by population stratification.3 In reality the situation is worse since there is ample evidence that many observational studies,4,5 randomized controlled trials6,7 and genetic association studies8–10 are poorly conducted or reported, often in ways that can have profound effects on causal understanding and, as a consequence, detrimental effects on the development and use of effective interventions for disease prevention and treatment.

One attempt to improve this situation is the generation of a number of guidelines for reporting different study types. These guidelines include ‘CONsolidation Standards Of Reporting Trials’ (CONSORT) [http://www.consort-statement.org], ‘QUality Of Reporting Of Meta-analyses’ . . . [Full Text of this Article]

Journals should only publish ‘important nulls’

How would this approach deal with ‘chance’ findings in research?

Health journals are newspapers and therefore interested in news—they will always want to report the earthquake that happened and not all the places without earthquakes
How can we trust peer reviewers to decide what is important to publish?

Where does the discussion section of the paper come into this?

Good analyses are pre-specified, but also iterative; ‘prior to results submission’ is too didactic
This only deals with publication bias that results from editors and reviewers not that which results from authors
This is a 2-stage review process and so will slow things down and require extra resources that most journals do not have
Some concluding thoughts


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Erratum
Int. J. Epidemiol., December 1, 2007; 36(6): 1371 - 1371.
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