Obstacles to the reuse of study metadata in ClinicalTrials.gov.

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

SUBMITTER: Miron L 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7749162 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature