Identifying Clinical Trials and Trial Results for Systematic Reviews & Other Evidence Syntheses: Making the Most of Trials Registers, Regulatory Agency Sources & Other Novel Resources (online)

Data from clinical trials registers are essential to answering many systematic review, health technology assessment, comparative effectiveness research, clinical and other research questions.  Clinical trials registers such as ClinicalTrials.gov and portals such as the WHO International Clinical Trials Registry Platform (ICTRP) provide information on both ongoing and completed trials.  Many registers include trial results for completed research, often before they are available through traditional, published sources and in many cases, they provide results for studies which are never published.  Increasing awareness of the importance of clinical trials and their results has led to the development of a large number of trials registers.  Trials registers are in constant development and provide challenges to librarians and researchers in terms of searching and record management.  Data on trials are also increasingly available from clinical study reports produced by the pharmaceutical industry in support of drug marketing applications and regulatory agency sources such as the European Medicines Agency (EMA) and the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA).  These sources all pose challenges in terms of searching, data management, search recording and updating.  This online course explores these sources and approaches to identifying trial information and offers practical advice on searching, managing and recording the process.

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