About Trials

What is Trials?

Trials is an open access, peer-reviewed, online journal that will encompass all aspects of the performance and findings of randomized controlled trials. Trials will experiment with, and then refine, innovative approaches to improving communication about trials. We are keen to move beyond publishing traditional trial results articles (although these will be included). We believe this represents an exciting opportunity to advance the science and reporting of trials. Prior to 2006, Trials was published as Current Controlled Trials in Cardiovascular Medicine (CCTCVM). All published CCTCVM articles are available via the Trials website and citations to CCTCVM article URLs will continue to be supported.

Making all its content open access and not retaining copyright, Trials offers a way to make data both freely available and highly visible to trialists worldwide; this will benefit the impact of your publication among peers and society. The journal has unrestricted space and takes advantage of all the technical possibilities available for electronic publishing.

To date, journals have focused on reporting the results of trials, with very little coverage of why and how they are conducted. Reports of trials have been restricted both by authors and editors - both parties often select only a subset of the outcomes measured, while the latter often impose word limits on the articles published making it difficult to communicate the lessons learnt from conducting the trial, let alone include adequate details of how the trial was conducted.

The Internet offers both unlimited space and interactivity, and we are keen to harness these attributes. For instance, trialists will be able to provide the detail required to be a true scientific record and do more to make the article's message comprehensible to a variety of reader groups. They will also be able to communicate not only all outcome measures, as well as varying analyses and interpretations, but also in-depth descriptions of what they did and what they learnt. This sharing of direct experience is fundamental to improving the quality and conduct of trials worldwide.

Trials supports initiatives to improve the performance and reporting of clinical trials, part of which includes prospective registering and numbering of trials. While there are initiatives to ensure that all clinical trials are registered (most notably the recent statement from the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors - see http://www.icmje.org/clin_trialup.htm), we are focussing on controlled trials of healthcare interventions, for now. Authors of protocols or reports of controlled trials must register their trial prior to submission in a suitable publicly accessible registry. The trial registers that currently meet all of the ICMJE guidelines can be found at http://www.icmje.org/faq.pdf.

Authors and peer reviewers are requested to make use of checklists that have been developed for randomized controlled trials (CONSORT) and systematic reviews (QUOROM), and must complete a declaration of competing interests. Research carried out on humans must be in compliance with the Helsinki Declaration. BioMed Central is a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). For more information, visit www.publicationethics.org.uk. BioMed Central endorses the World Association of Medical Editors (WAME) Policy Statement on Geopolitical Intrusion on Editorial Decisions.

Scope of the journal

Trials aims to be broad in scope and considers articles covering the following:

Articles about a specific randomized trial

• Complete trial protocol (an accompanying discussion of why the trial was designed the way it was is encouraged)
• First report of trial findings
• Expanded report of trial findings after a shorter version has appeared in another peer-reviewed journal
• Secondary analyses (e.g. health economic analysis, harms and other non-primary outcomes, sensitivity analyses)
• Discussion of specific issues of the trial design
• Description of particular aspects of the trial conduct, such as data collection, choice or measurement of outcomes, training of observers, data handling, organisational issues, etc
• Lessons learned: "What we would do differently knowing what we know now"
• Critical commentary on a trial report published elsewhere
  

Articles about randomized trials in general

• Issues related to the design, conduct, analysis, interpretation, reporting or publication of randomized trials
• Issues relating to assessing outcomes, especially efforts to standardise outcomes in a particular medical field
• Reviews of published articles describing randomized trials relating to one or more of the following: trial design, organisation, conduct, analysis, reporting, and interpretation
• Discussion of issues relating to randomized trials, especially topical matters

Commentaries

• Commentary to accompany articles published in Trials (these are usually commissioned)

The articles should be classified as one of the following types:

• Study protocols: describe proposed or ongoing research, providing a detailed account of the hypothesis, rationale, and methodology of the study.
• Research: Original studies rated as scientifically valid contributions to the field.
• Commentaries: short, focused and opinionated articles on any subject within the scope of the journal. These articles are usually related to a contemporary issue, such as recent research findings, and are often written by opinion leaders.
• Methodology articles: present a new experimental method, test or procedure. The method described may either be completely new, or may offer a better version of an existing method.
• Reviews: comprehensive, authoritative descriptions of any subject within the journal's scope, these articles are usually written by opinion leaders that have been invited by the Steering or Advisory Group, but can be submitted after acceptance of an author's proposal.

Reviews and commentaries are usually commissioned, but suggestions in the form of a brief summary are welcome and should be sent to the Editors.

Trials offers the possibility to post Comments on articles.

Peer-review policies

• All original submissions will be subject to immediate screening by the in-house editorial team
• Peer review will be open
• Those submissions that meet the journal's criteria will be sent to at least two referees who have agreed to assess the article rapidly. The Editors will make every effort to reach decisions within 6 weeks of submission.
• Peer reviewers will have four possible options, for each article:
• accept without revision
• accept after revision without expecting to check those revisions
• neither accept nor reject until author(s) make revisions and resubmit
• reject because scientifically unsound
• Articles that do not match the journal's scope, or that obviously do not meet the scientific standards of the journal, may be declined by the Editors without further review.
• In general, only one revised version will be considered for further peer review if revisions have been requested by the referees.

Edited by Doug Altman, Curt Furberg, Jeremy Grimshaw and Peter Rothwell, Trials is supported by an international Editorial Board.

Publishing in Trials

All articles will be listed in PubMed immediately upon acceptance (after peer review), and will be covered by PubMed Central, MEDLINE, Thomson Reuters (ISI) and Scopus.

Articles in Trials should be cited in the same way as articles in a traditional journal. However, because articles in this journal are not printed, they do not have page numbers. Instead, they have a unique article number.

The following citation:

Trials 2004, 2:1

refers to article 1 from volume 2 of the journal.

As an online journal, Trials does not have issue numbers. Each volume corresponds to a calendar year.

To keep up to date with the latest articles from Trials, why not register to receive alerts? Registration also enables you to customise your subject areas of interest, store your searches, and submit your manuscripts.

Submission of manuscripts

Manuscripts should be submitted electronically to Trials using the online submission system. Full details of how to submit a manuscript are given in the instructions for authors.

General journal policies

Trials is published  by BioMed Central, an independent publisher committed to ensuring peer-reviewed biomedical research is Open Access. That means it is freely and universally accessible online, it is archived in at least one internationally recognised free access repository, and its authors retain copyright, allowing anyone to reproduce or disseminate articles, according to the BioMed Central copyright and licence agreement. Trials however, has taken this further by making all its content Open Access.

Trials's articles are archived in PubMed Central, the US National Library of Medicine's full-text repository of life science literature, and also at INIST in France and in e-Depot, the National Library of the Netherlands' digital archive of all electronic publications. The journal is also participating in the British Library's e-journals pilot project, and plans to deposit copies of all articles with the British Library.

BioMed Central is working closely with the Thomson Reuters (ISI) to ensure that citation analysis of articles published in Trials will be available.

Trials is able to deliver summaries of frequently updated content via Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds. These are accessible via the orange "XML" button at the top of the list of recent articles or the list of most accessed articles. For more information about RSS feeds see our publisher's website.

For further information about general policies please see the instructions for authors.