From the Editor-in-Chief's Desk

This edition of the journal contains many intriguing and clinically relevant investigations from researchers around the globe, including worthy articles on adjunctive pharmacotherapy in autism, novel methylphenidate formulations, and new candidates for the treatment of pediatric major depressive disorder.

In counterpoint to this welcome new information, I would like to draw your attention briefly to Strawn et al.'s review and analysis of abandoned trials of buspirone for the treatment of generalized anxiety disorder (GAD). This article commendably focuses our attention on the wealth of data in the field that is too often ignored.

Strawn et al. identify a landscape that should be familiar to any reader of this journal. “The last two decades have seen a number of efforts to increase the evidence base for psychopharmacologic treatment in children and adolescents,” the authors write. “However, despite an increased number of clinical trials in children and adolescents, relatively few are published.”

The authors express concern that “these invisible, unpublished trials contribute to publication bias,” and propose that analysis of data can widen and strengthen the evidence base and present new possibilities for future research. Buspirone is a suitable target, they write, as the results of efficacy studies for its use in the treatment of GAD “have not been published or disseminated beyond a brief addition to the medication ‘label’ in 2001.”

I invite you to read Strawn et al.'s in-depth discussion of their use of Bayesian methods to analyze the data, which “provide clinically significant insight into the potential magnitude of the effect of buspirone in reducing anxiety symptoms in youth with GAD.”

A complement to preserving and analyzing discarded clinical trial data is the open sharing of collected data on a prospective basis. To that end, I would like to applaud my colleagues at the Child Mind Institute, including Lindsay Alexander and Michael P. Milham, on the publication of their article on the Healthy Brain Network community research initiative. The article in Nature Scientific Data, “An open resource for transdiagnostic research in pediatric mental health and learning disorders,” argues for deeply phenotyped open resources with rigorous quality control and the freely available tools that will encourage the adoption of big data approaches.

“It is critical to accrue large-scale multimodal datasets that capture a broad range of commonly encountered clinical psychopathology,” the authors write. “Access to such a range of data will ensure that the HBN Biobank will allow for scholars to address rich and clinically relevant questions.” Interested readers can find the article at ( nature.com/articles/sdata2017181).