RE: Does More Mean More?

["Peter Banks" <pbanks@diabetes.org>]

Emma,

Neither I nor anyone else who supports the concept of journals 
filtering papers are suggesting withholding papers. In health 
sciences, all clinical trials papers should be available 
somewhere. As the case of Vioxx shows, researchers need access to 
all the data about a particular drug to conduct the meta-analyses 
that would uncover dangerous side effects (As Eric Topol did with 
Vioxx and other drugs.)

But that doesn't mean that a particular journal shouldn't filter 
out papers that are poorly designed or outside its focus. 
Surely a prestigious title like PLoS Clinical Trials does not 
publish every study that comes over the transom.

The fact that we don't publish studies that we consider poorly 
designed or unrelated to diabetes does not mean that we don't 
support their publication somewhere, formally or in postprint 
form.

Peter Banks
Publisher
American Diabetes Association
Email: pbanks@diabetes.org

>>> eveitch@plos.org 02/07/06 6:56 PM >>>

Agree with Steve. Particularly in the field of health sciences, 
researchers who are doing systematic reviews or meta-analyses of 
the literature would want access to *all* available information, 
not just the subset that particular journals have filtered out 
for them. The resercher's own filtering criteria can be specified 
in the queries they put to PubMed or other databases. The 
challenge is in making indexing of the literature sufficiently 
sophisticated so it can support the sorts of queries that users 
will want to run.

Best, Emma

Emma Veitch, PhD
Publications Manager, PLoS Clinical Trials
Public Library of Science
eveitch@plos.org