"Underreporting research is scientific misconduct"

The AllTrials campaign is an initiative of Bad Science, BMJ, Centre for Evidence-based Medicine, Cochrane Collaboration, James Lind Initiative, PLOS and Sense About Scienceand is being led in the US by Dartmouth’s Geisel School of Medicine and the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy & Clinical Practice.

The AllTrials campaign was launched in January 2013 and calls for all past and present clinical trials to be registered and their results reported. The campaign has published a detailed plan on how all clinical trials can be registered and all results reported. You can download the PDF or read it online

The AllTrials campaigns relies on your donations. You can donate atwww.justgiving.com/alltrials or email alltrials@senseaboutscience.org to donate in other ways.

David Tovey, Editor in Chief, The Cochrane Library: “Realism is hugely important in medicine and one of the building blocks of trust between health professionals and the public. Realism depends on researchers, professionals and the public having access to the full picture from all relevant trials. The Cochrane Collaboration conducts systematic reviews to inform decision making, but the process is undermined if our researchers can only access a fraction of the information required.”

Tracey Brown, Director, Sense About Science: “Everybody agrees that all clinical trials should be registered, and that we should at the very least have access to the basic results, and ideally the full Clinical Study Reports. But there have been years of foot-dragging and non-compliance with requirements. We expect doctors and researchers to have access to the best available evidence, not half of it. Government and regulators must listen to what the public thinks about this. It’s a vital matter of public interest for the medicine we have now and the medicines we might have in the future.”

Ben Goldacre: “This problem has been dodged for too long. Over the next two years, many of the drugs in common use will come to the end of their patent life. When that happens, it may become even harder to get the information that has been withheld. By signing the AllTrials petition you can show governments, regulators and research bodies how much this matters, and why they need to act now. Industry and academics must share all trial results: without this information, doctors are misled, and patients are harmed.”

Dr Richard Lehman: “It is a scandal that doctors like myself often prescribe treatments without knowing their true benefits and harms, because research evidence from human trials has been withheld. That means that over my 35 years as a GP, I have unintentionally spent large sums of NHS money on treatments that did not work, and some patients have suffered avoidable harm. We need immediate access to all the data relating to all the drugs and devices which we use on millions of people every day.”

Richard Stephens, Chair of the NIHR Cancer Consumer Liaison Group: “The Department of Health report, Innovation Health and Wealth, sets out a goal for the NHS that every willing patient should be able to take part in research. In our publication, Action On Access, we call for research to be embedded in clinical practice. Already 20% of cancer patients in the UK take part in clinical trials as part of their treatment options3. We expect that the results of trials will be made freely available to researchers, clinicians and administrators, in order to deliver better treatments, better services, and better outcomes for patients. So all clinical trials should be on a central accessible register, and all trials should be reporting their results, even if they do not change clinical practice.”

Carl Heneghan, Director, Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine, University of Oxford: “There is a fundamental lack of scientific progress because clinical trial evidence is being withheld. The missing results from the last 20 years also represent lost opportunities to replicate results and learn from all that research, and to develop some of it in light of new discoveries.”

Sir Iain Chalmers, Coordinator, James Lind Initiative: “More than 20 years ago the Journal of the American Medical Association published an article written by me entitled ‘Underreporting research is scientific misconduct’. The evidence that has accumulated over the subsequent two decades has made clear that underreporting clinical trials is widespread and constitutes not only scientific misconduct, but also unethical misconduct. The result has been harm to patients and built-in inefficiency in efforts to discover useful and safer treatments.”