Palliative care research: State of play and journal direction.

What is the state of play in palliative care research? Do we reflect that as a journal? We want to reflect, where possible, the cutting edge of research in the field, promote the highest possible standards of palliative care research, encourage wide research dissemination, and work to facilitate the translation of research evidence into impact on all aspects of palliative care practice and policy. It is hard however to determine what the current situation is with palliative care research internationally. Whilst there are an increasing number of atlases of palliative care, both international, regional and national, few explicitly map palliative care research resource, although its importance is often acknowleged. The latest EAPC Atlas of Palliative Care in Europe 1 does outline research capacity in each country, but this tells us little about the type, quality and quantity of research undertaken. In the UK, the academic palliative care research groups have been called 'fragile', with little growth noted during the 2000s 2. Studies of palliative care research tell us a little more about focus, quality and type of research. National studies, such as those in Sweden and Ireland, identify upward trends in publication numbers, and an increase in quatitative research approaches and studies outside cancer, although there remain critiques of the small scale of studies 3 4. International studies are also increasing in number, allthough are predominantly observational rather than interventional 5. Trials in palliative care remain small, with low quality of reporting 6. Given these trends, we wanted to see how the research we publish in Palliative Medicine compares. Certainly we can see an increase in the number of papers submitted to the journal over time, between 2010 to 2015 we saw a 48% increase in the number of annual submissions. More interesting perhaps is to examine the type of research we publish. Whilst we haven't compared with submitted research, in the first 8 editions of 2016, the papers we published comprise 29% reviews, 46% quantitative research, 19% qualitative research, 5% mixed methods. Overall, only 2.5% of the papers we published reported trials, most of the quantitative papers were cross-sectional or cohort studies. We also examined the funding declarations of these papers: 38% declared no funding source for their research, of which 62% were reporting empirical research not just reviews for which funding sources can be challenging. Studies with no funding declarations came from across contintnents: 17 from Europe, 3 …