Author's response to reviews Title: The Hall Technique; a randomised control clinical trial of a novel method of managing carious primary molars in general dental practice: outcomes at two years. Authors:

Title: The Hall Technique; a randomised control clinical trial of a novel method of managing carious primary molars in general dental practice: outcomes at two years. 1 The following are the authors responses (in blue), to the comments made by the referees. In order to fully understand the referees comments, and the authors responses to them, it should be noted that this paper was originally submitted as two papers, which have subsequently been combined. Reviewer's report Title: The Hall Technique; a randomised control clinical trial of a novel method of managing carious primary molars in general dental practice: outcomes at two years. General comment 1-This was a very interesting and highly relevant study. The tested intervention is simple and does appear to be comfortable for the patient and effective for the treatment of dental caries in primary teeth. The study adopted a pragmatic approach, which reflects more accurately the reality of clinicians and patients in every day real life circumstances, than most traditional clinical trials do. Response to point 1: No response required Specific comments Title 2-Instead of " randomised control clinical trial " , may be it is better " randomized controlled clinical trial ". Not only in the title, but also throughout the text, this term should be changed as suggested. Response to point 2: a) Accept: This is a thorny issue. The word randomised is standard in the English speaking world as the un-Americanised version of randomized. If you search for randomised drug trial in Scopus (which covers PubMed), limit to Health Science and " article " , the following will be picked up: 6 results in 2007 with the UK spelling 15 with the US spelling and randomi*ed picks up all 21. There is no easy answer to this problem but it is hoped that most researches will use the * in their search. Because more trials tend to be picked up with the US spelling, we are happy to change to " randomized ". b) Accept: Both 'control' and 'controlled' are acceptable, and widely used, versions of this term. Introduction 3-The authors should avoid the discussion about " to fill or nor to fill " primary teeth. Their study did not deal with this question. They compared different