ctrdata-registers {ctrdata}R Documentation

Information on clinical trial registers

Description

Registers of the four clinical trial registers from which package ctrdata can retrieve, aggregate and analyse protocol- and result-related information as well as documents, last updated 2025-05-31.

1 - Overview

2 - Notable changes

CTGOV "classic" was retired on 2024-06-25; ctrdata subsequently translates CTGOV queries to CTGOV2 queries. The new website ("CTGOV2") can be used with ctrdata since 2023-08-27. Database collections created with CTGOV queries can still be used since functions in ctrdata continue to support them. CTIS was relaunched on 2024-06-17, changing the data structure and search syntax, to which ctrdata was updated. CTIS can be used with ctrdata since 2023-03-25. EUCTR removed search parameter ⁠status=⁠ as of February 2025. More information on changes: here.

3 - References

Material EUCTR CTGOV2 ISRCTN CTIS
About link link link link
Terms & conditions, disclaimer link link link link
How to search link link link link
Search interface link link link link
Expert / advanced search link link link link
Glossary / related information link link link link
FAQ / caveats / examples link link, link, link link link
Data dictionaries / structure link, link, link link, link, link link link (see XLSX files)
Example* (see below) link link link link

Some registers are expanding entered search terms using dictionaries (example).

4 - Example and ctrdata motivation

See vignette("ctrdata_summarise") for several other examples.

*This example is an expert search for interventional trials primarily with neonates, investigating treatments for infectious conditions. It shows that searches in the web interface of most registers are not sufficient to identify the trials of interest:

To address this issue, trials can be retrieved with ctrLoadQueryIntoDb into a database collection and in a second step trials of interest can be selected based on values of relevant fields, for example:

ctrdata supports users with pre-defined ctrdata-trial-concepts and these cover the example above, and with functions dbFindFields and ctrShowOneTrial for finding fields of interest and reviewing data structure, respectively.

Author(s)

Ralf Herold ralf.herold@mailbox.org


[Package ctrdata version 1.24.0 Index]