ArticleScientific data2020
Obstacles to the reuse of study metadata in ClinicalTrials.gov.
Article in Scientific data, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 28 papers, 2 of them syntheses 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
28 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- Characterisation of digital therapeutic clinical trials: a systematic review with natural language processing.The Lancet. Digital health · 2024Pooled it
- Semantic and Geographical Analysis of COVID-19 Trials Reveals a Fragmented Clinical Research Landscape Likely to Impair Informativeness.Frontiers in medicine · 2020Pooled it
- Enhanced Health Study Discoverability: Graph-Based Analysis Approach.JMIR medical informatics · 2026Article
- Adaptive trials in low back pain and osteoarthritis: How common are they and when should they be used? A systematic review from ClinicalTrials.gov.Osteoarthritis and cartilage open · 2026Review
- Ten Recommendations for Improving Research on Stroke Motor Rehabilitation: A Unified Perspective.Restorative neurology and neuroscience · 2026Review
- Toward total recall: Enhancing data FAIRness through AI-driven metadata standardization.GigaScience · 2026Article
- Retrieval-enhanced drafting of ClinicalTrials.gov data elements from clinical protocols.Journal of clinical and translational science · 2026Article
- Landscape analysis of oncology nutrition research among patients being treated for cancer.Supportive care in cancer : official journal of the Multinational Association of Supportive Care in Cancer · 2025Article
- Real-world evaluation of user engagement with an artificial intelligence-powered clinical trial application in oncology.Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association : JAMIA · 2025Article
- Patient Enrollment to Industry-Sponsored Versus Federally-Sponsored Cancer Clinical Trials.Journal of clinical oncology : official journal of the American Society of Clinical Oncology · 2024Article
- Constructing a finer-grained representation of clinical trial results from ClinicalTrials.gov.Scientific data · 2024Article
- Constructing a finer-grained representation of clinical trial results from ClinicalTrials.gov.Scientific data · 2024Article
- Linking Cancer Clinical Trials to their Result Publications.AMIA Joint Summits on Translational Science proceedings. AMIA Joint Summits on Translational Science · 2024Article
- Data monitoring committees in pediatric randomized controlled trials registered in ClinicalTrials.gov.Clinical trials (London, England) · 2023Article
- Schema Playground: a tool for authoring, extending, and using metadata schemas to improve FAIRness of biomedical data.BMC bioinformatics · 2023Article
- Predicting Publication of Clinical Trials Using Structured and Unstructured Data: Model Development and Validation Study.Journal of medical Internet research · 2022Article
- Modeling community standards for metadata as templates makes data FAIR.Scientific data · 2022Article
- Update on the clinical trial landscape: analysis of ClinicalTrials.gov registration data, 2000-2020.Trials · 2022Article
- Achieving Inclusivity by Design: Social and Contextual Information in Medical Knowledge.Yearbook of medical informatics · 2022Review
- Schema Playground: A tool for authoring, extending, and using metadata schemas to improve FAIRness of biomedical data.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Metadata that are structured using principled schemas and that use terms from ontologies are essential to making biomedical data findable and reusable for downstream analyses. The largest source of metadata that describes the experimental protocol, funding, and scientific leadership of clinical studies is ClinicalTrials.gov. We evaluated whether values in 302,091 trial records adhere to expected data types and use terms from biomedical ontologies, whether records contain fields required by government regulations, and whether structured elements could replace free-text elements. Contact information, outcome measures, and study design are frequently missing or underspecified. Important fields for search, such as condition and intervention, are not restricted to ontologies, and almost half of the conditions are not denoted by MeSH terms, as recommended. Eligibility criteria are stored as semi-structured free text. Enforcing the presence of all required elements, requiring values for certain fields to be drawn from ontologies, and creating a structured eligibility criteria element would improve the reusability of data from ClinicalTrials.gov in systematic reviews, metanalyses, and matching of eligible patients to trials.
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.