Biased touching of the editorial tiller

Abstract

I was saddened to find that your redrafted instructions to authors' confirm that you continue to allow authors of 'negative trials' a mere 500 words to introduce and state their hypotheses, give an adequate description of their methods and results, and state their conclusions.Although you do not define the term negative trial, presumably you use it to refer to studies in which no statistically significant differences between treatments have been shown.This biased touching of the editorial tiller has two serious implications.Firstly, it discourages submission of statistically powerful treatment comparisons in which no statistically significant differences are observed.Secondly, because statistically significant differences observed in small trials tend to overestimate true treatment differences, it actively fosters such overestimates in the material you make available to your readers.