I just reviewed the April 1991 issue of Pediatric Research which contains the APS-SPR abstracts. You can't help but notice that neonatology is the most active area of clinical research. Of the 2257 manuscripts submitted, at least 1119 can be classified as neonatal. There are now more than 2500 board-certified neonatologists in the United States. We certainly get high marks for producing abstracts.
That's the good news. The bad news, I think, is how trivial, repetitive, and fruitless some of these studies seem to be. I stopped counting when I reached 20 abstracts which ended with the phrase "but of course this study needs to be repeated on a larger number of patients in a prospective randomized controlled trial."
