Introduction: A necessary starting point for unbiased reviews is identification of all the potentially relevant RCTs, published and unpublished. The search for RCTs is organized and done by review groups as a crucial step in the preparation of a review. A large group of journals which may be overlooked by specific review groups consists of the general health care journals. For this reason a project (funded by the EU program Biomed1) was launched to organize the handsearch of these journals in Europe. After receiving considerable support by the German Ministry of Health the originally planned work could be extended and allowed to analyse the results of the handsearch.

Objective:

Present and examine the results of handsearching German language general health care journals. Consider characteristics and quality of published studies and of articles.

Methods:

General health care journals were handsearched by students and scientists. For the quality assessment different scoring systems were applied.

Results:

The handsearching produced a large amount of identified articles eligible for inclusion into the database of RCTs. Quantity and quality of articles and studies show big changes over time, in particular a decrease of published studies during the last years.

Discussion:

The German general health care journals proved to be a rich source of controlled and randomized clinical trials. This indicates that German specialised journals should also be handsearched by review groups.