Do urology journals enforce trial registration? A cross-sectional study of published trials

OBJECTIVES: Trial registration can increase scientific transparency, but its implementation in specialty fields such as urology is unclear. We aimed to assess the endorsement of trial registration in the author instructions of urology-related journals and to assess whether randomized controlled trials (RCTs) in the field were effectively registered. DESIGN: Cross-sectional study of published trials. SETTING: We first assessed the author instructions of urology-related journals indexed in ‘Journal Citation Reports 2009’ (12/2010). Second, we divided the results into two groups of five journals each, all with high impact factors either requiring or not mentioning trial registration as a precondition for publication. We then performed a MEDLINE search to identify RCTs published in these 10 journals in 2009 (01/2011) and searched the clinical trials meta-search interface of the World Health Organization (ICTRP) for RCTs without information about registration (01–03/2011). Two authors indepe...