When medical research fails: A study of clinical controlled trials that were discontinued

Erik von Elm is a senior researcher at the Institute of Social and Preventive Medicine at the University Hospital Lausanne / Switzerland and co-director of Cochrane Switzerland. He studied medicine in Tübingen / Germany and Montpellier / France and holds a master degree in epidemiology (London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, University of London) and a specialist degree in prevention & health services (Swiss Medical Board, FMH). His research interests are in evidence-based medicine, the synthesis and dissemination of research evidence and the epidemiology of injury and disability. He has conducted empirical studies on aspects of biomedical publishing including duplicate publication and selective reporting of clinical studies. He has been involved in several initiatives to establish guidelines for the reporting of different types of biomedical studies, in particular in the Strengthening the Reporting of Observational Studies in Epidemiology (STROBE) Initiative. He teaches at the Universities of Freiburg / Germany and Lucerne / Switzerland, and serves as academic editor of PLoS ONE, an open-access electronic journal of the Public Library of Science, and as ad-hoc reviewer for several funding agencies and peer-reviewed journals. During his stay he is working on a new empirical study on clinical trials that are discontinued for reasons such as insufficient recruitment of participants.