RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Obstacles to the Reuse of Study Metadata in ClinicalTrials.gov
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 850578
DO 10.1101/850578
A1 Laura Miron
A1 Rafael S. Gonçalves
A1 Mark A. Musen
YR 2020
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/08/16/850578.abstract
AB 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.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.