Felicitations on the birth of Evidence-Based Nursing (EBN) and best wishes for the future. I was particularly glad to see that you have made a start on working out how to select reliable studies reporting qualitative data.

The first issue of EBN prompts me to write with a suggestion which I hope you will consider implementing as the journal matures. I think it is potentially misleading to concentrate on abstracting individual studies (as EBN has begun to) unless either the authors or the commentators have made a systematic effort to set the results of these studies within the context of other relevant studies. For example, the study on the effects of sucrose on crying in newborn babies which you selected for abstracting is 1 of at least 5 relevant controlled trials, yet these other trials are not mentioned in the commentary. In fact, the relevant trials on this topic have been assessed in a good systematic review which must have been published at about the same time as the single study you selected for presentation.¹ In my view, the systematic review provides evidence of much greater importance to your readers than the outcome of the particular study you selected (in which the phrase `Ross Special Formula' is mentioned three times!).

Unless the results of the individual studies you select for presentation in EBN are systematically set in proper context, either by the authors or by your commentators, your readers are likely to be misled—by the play of chance among similar studies if by nothing else.