ReviewTrials2021
COVID-19-related research in Africa: a cross-sectional review of the International Clinical Trial Registration Platform (ICTRP).
Review in Trials, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 papers.
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
8 citing papers in PubMed, 12 citations in OpenAlex.
- Overcoming Vaccine Inequities and Research Gaps in Africa: Challenges and Opportunities Identified During the COVID-19 Pandemic.Clinical infectious diseases : an official publication of the Infectious Diseases Society of America · 2025Article
- Tailoring COVID-19 Vaccination Strategies in High-Seroprevalence Settings: Insights from Ethiopia.Vaccines · 2024Article
- Practical Guidelines for Standardised Resolution of Important Protocol Deviations in Clinical Trials Conducted in Sub-Saharan Africa.Therapeutic innovation & regulatory science · 2024Article
- Did Ghana Do Enough? A Scientometric Analysis of COVID-19 Research Output from Ghana within the African Context.Diseases (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Review
- The international clinical trials registry platform (ICTRP): data integrity and the trends in clinical trials, diseases, and drugs.Frontiers in pharmacology · 2023Article
- Acceptability and feasibility of home and hospital follow-up in Burkina Faso and Guinea: A mixed-method study among patients of the COVID-19 Coverage-Africa clinical trial.PLOS global public health · 2023Article
- Epidemiology, Clinical Characteristics, and Mortality of Hospitalized Patients with Severe COVID-19 in Uganda, 2020-2021.Annals of the American Thoracic Society · 2022Article
- Clinical trial registration during COVID-19 and beyond in the African context: what have we learned?Trials · 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
5 authors at 3 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
objectiveThe declaration of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), a pandemic in early 2020, has seen an upsurge in research globally to fill gaps in the epidemiology of the SARS-CoV-2 virus impact on health care and clinical management, as well as possible prevention and treatment modalities. Published literature on the different types of COVID-19 research conducted globally is varied and is particularly limited in Africa. This study sets out to describe the COVID-19-related research registered and conducted on the African continent.
methodsThis is a cross-sectional study of all COVID-19-related studies available in the WHO's International Clinical Trials Registry Platform (ICTRP) repository. We extracted studies registered from March 1, 2020, to July 15, 2021. A descriptive analysis of the extracted data was performed, and the findings were presented.
resultsAt extraction, a total of 12,533 COVID-19-related studies were listed on the ICTRP portal. We included 9803 studies, after excluding 2060 duplicate records and 686 records without a site/country. While 9347 studies (96%) were conducted outside of Africa, only 456 studies (4%) were conducted in the African continent, of which 270 (59.2%) were interventional studies, and 184 (40.4%) were observational studies. About 80% of the studies were conducted in Egypt and South Africa, and most of these involved testing of drugs and biologicals.
conclusionThe African continent hosts considerably fewer COVID-19-related research compared to other parts of the world. This may have implications on scientific evidence available for implementing COVID-19 control efforts. There is, therefore, a need for local funding and ownership of research projects and north-south collaboration in research.
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.