Anaesthesia
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The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors recommends the prospective registration of interventional clinical trials. We aimed to assess the compliance with these guidelines for manuscripts submitted to and published by a single anaesthetic journal. We examined the rates of prospective trial registration, the incidence of discrepancies in primary outcome measure(s) and sample sizes, and the citation metrics of all randomised controlled trials published in Anaesthesia over a 3-year period (2014-2016). ⋯ There was no difference in the median (IQR [range]) number of citations per month since publication between prospectively (0.27 (0.15-0.46 [0.00-1.59]), and retrospectively (0.39 (0.15-0.62 [0.10-0.67]); p = 0.502) or unregistered (0.33 (0.10-0.52 [0.00-0.67]); p = 0.867) studies. Our results suggest that prospective clinical trial registration has no influence on acceptance for publication by Anaesthesia or subsequent citation metrics. The international recommendation for prospective trial registration appears to have not been universally incorporated into anaesthetic-related research practice.