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Alessandro Liberati, MD
Istituto Mario Negri Milano, Italy

JAMA. 1992;267(21):2891.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

To the Editor.

—The recent Editorial by Dr Rennie and Ms Flanagin¹ summarized the state of our knowledge on publication bias, its determinants, and the logical possible steps to counteract its existence.

While I have no doubts that the implementation of remedial actions (such as prospective registration of trials conditional on funding² and careful monitoring by institutional review boards, etc) will be very useful for investigators and "meta-analysts," I have reservations on the usefulness of registries of trials for individual practitioners who are most of the time not well educated on critical appraisal of the medical literature, to say nothing about publication bias.

Even though Rennie and Flanagin are correct when, in looking at the findings by Dickersin et al³ and others,⁴ they point out that most publication bias is due to the investigators themselves, I believe that medical journals should take their own steps against . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

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