ArticleJournal of medical ethics2017
When clinical trials compete: prioritising study recruitment.
Article in Journal of medical ethics, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 24 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
24 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- A systematic review on disease-drug-drug interactions with immunomodulating drugs: A critical appraisal of risk assessment and drug labelling.British journal of clinical pharmacology · 2022Pooled it
- Psychosocial Factors Associated With Parental Self-Efficacy in Adolescent Suicide Prevention: A Mixed Methods Study Protocol.Research in nursing & health · 2026Article
- A framework for health systems to assess and prioritize participation in pragmatic clinical trials.Learning health systems · 2025Article
- Global collaboration between platform trials in surgery and anaesthesia.The British journal of surgery · 2024Article
- Article
- Article
- Lessons learned from the conduct of inpatient clinical trials in a pandemic.Journal of clinical and translational science · 2024Article
- Crowdfunding and Crowdsourcing of Aging Science.Cold Spring Harbor perspectives in medicine · 2023Review
- Competition for recruitment in SARS-CoV-2 Trials in the United States: a longitudinal cohort analysis.BMC research notes · 2022Article
- Economic Evaluation of Cost and Time Required for a Platform Trial vs Conventional Trials.JAMA network open · 2022Article
- How COVID-19 changed clinical research strategies: a global survey.The Journal of international medical research · 2022Article
- Article
- Allocation of Opportunities to Participate in Clinical Trials during the Covid-19 Pandemic and Other Public Health Emergencies.The Hastings Center report · 2022Article
- An ethics framework for consolidating and prioritizing COVID-19 clinical trials.Clinical trials (London, England) · 2021Article
- Research response to coronavirus disease 2019 needed better coordination and collaboration: a living mapping of registered trials.Journal of clinical epidemiology · 2021Article
- Ethical Challenges in Clinical Research During the COVID-19 Pandemic.Journal of bioethical inquiry · 2020Article
- A Prehospital Acute Stroke Trial has Only Modest Impact on Enrollment in Concurrent, Post-arrival-Recruiting Stroke Trials.Journal of stroke and cerebrovascular diseases : the official journal of National Stroke Association · 2020Article
- Regional variations in adverse event reporting rates and ACR responses in placebo/standard-of-care arms of rheumatoid arthritis trials.Rheumatology (Oxford, England) · 2020Observational
- Paying Participants in COVID-19 Trials.The Journal of infectious diseases · 2020Article
- Advancing Clinical Trials for Inherited Retinal Diseases: Recommendations from the Second Monaciano Symposium.Translational vision science & technology · 2020Review
Corrections and comments
- Commented on by
- Commented on by
- Commented on by
Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
Abstract
It is not uncommon for multiple clinical trials at the same institution to recruit concurrently from the same patient population. When the relevant pool of patients is limited, as it often is, trials essentially compete for participants. There is evidence that such a competition is a predictor of low study accrual, with increased competition tied to increased recruitment shortfalls. But there is no consensus on what steps, if any, institutions should take to approach this issue. In this article, we argue that an institutional policy that prioritises some trials for recruitment ahead of others is ethically permissible and indeed prima facie preferable to alternative means of addressing recruitment competition. We motivate this view by appeal to the ethical importance of minimising the number of studies that begin but do not complete, thereby exposing their participants to unnecessary risks and burdens in the process. We then argue that a policy of prioritisation can be fair to relevant stakeholders, including participants, investigators and funders. Finally, by way of encouraging and helping to frame future debate, we propose some questions that would need to be addressed when identifying substantive ethical criteria for prioritising between studies.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.