EDITORIAL. Paucity of Negative Clinical Trials Reports and Publication Bias

Recently, a hallway conversation with an esteemed col-league caught my attention. Being pondered was the fact that relative to the literature on psychotherapy for adult persons, less information on the efficacy of these treatments for children and adolescents is available. The conversation turned quickly into an admission of difficulties encountered by authors when trying to publish negative results (i.e., no statistical difference between the active treatment and the control groups). Rather boldly, my response was: that the Journal of the Canadian Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry is decidedly interested in publishing reports of negative clinical trials, as long as they are methodologically and ethically sound. Critical examination of the scientific literature addressing therapeutic interventions – either medication or psycho-social treatments – reveals that the number of reports o