It鈥檚 called the 鈥渇ile-drawer problem鈥�. A study fails to produce interesting results, so is filed away and forgotten 鈥� a practice that might mean antidepressants don鈥檛 work as well as doctors think.
To get approval for the 12 antidepressants that went on the market between 1987 and 2004, drug firms registered over 70 clinical trials with the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). But when Erick Turner of Oregon Health and Science University in Portland and his colleagues combed through medical journals, they found that 23 of these studies never made it into a journal. All but one of the unpublished studies concluded that the effect of the drugs was negative or questionable ().
Consider all 70 studies and antidepressants still emerge as helpful drugs. Publication bias has exaggerated their effectiveness, Turner says, but it鈥檚 impossible to know if journals refused to publish the studies or didn鈥檛 get them in the first place.
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