PROSPECTIVE COMPARATIVE CLINICAL-TRIALS IN THE JOURNAL-OF-HAND-SURGERY-(AMERICAN)

All issues of The Journal of Hand Surgery (American), from volume 1, n umber 1 through volume 19, number 6, were reviewed to identify studies that might qualify as prospective, comparative clinical trials. Prosp ective studies that compared two or more clinical treatments were labe led as either randomized controlled trials (RCT) if they included same form of random assignment or controlled clinical trials (CCT) if they did not. A total of 25 CCT and 8 RCT were identified among the 3,107 articles, letters, and abstracts that were reviewed. The results will be used to update the Medline Database, to make online identification of RCTs and CCTs easier.