Fuller 2020
Appraisal of: Fuller, Kaleb, Aaron Bowers, and Matt Vassar(2020). Clinical Trial Registry Use in Minimally Invasive Surgical Oncology Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses. BMJ Evidence-Based Medicine 25(2);1-2.
Reviewer(s):
Juliet Brown
Deirdre Beecher
Full Reference:
Fuller, Kaleb, Aaron Bowers, and Matt Vassar(2020). Clinical Trial Registry Use in Minimally Invasive Surgical Oncology Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses. BMJ Evidence-Based Medicine 25(2);1-2. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjebm-2019-111207
Short description:
Searching clinical trial registries can help researchers achieve greater accuracy of search coverage and reduce potential risk of bias. Clinical trial registries (CTR) can provide a good resource for searching of unpublished material that can go some way to address this. The researchers created a topic-related (minimally invasive surgical oncology) data set of 137 Systematic Review and Meta-Analyses for inclusion (search period 01/01/2005 –12/12/2018) and found only 18 (13.1%) stated they had included searches within a clinical trial registry. Using the WHO’s International Clinical Trials Registry Platform to identify eligible CTR, their subsequent search of ClinicalTrials.gov as an example of a relevant and potentially useful clinical trial registry, they found for the 25 Systematic Reviews within their dataset, 16 (64.0%) could have benefited from additional unpublished resources from the CTR search. The researchers conclude that only a small number of the original authors explicitly stated they had searched CTR and that unpublished material found within clinical registries may help to reduce the possibility of publication bias and therefore provide a more accurate depiction of relevant outcomes for their studies.
Limitations stated by the author(s):
The authors describe the following limitations of this study:
Search strategies were not provided by any of the original authors for the 25 systematic reviews, so the researchers created their best approximation of what may have been done.
There may have been misjudgement on the part of the researchers regarding relevancy to the 25 systematic reviews topics and CTR findings may have been erroneously considered relevant or not.
It is possible that the original authors of the systematic reviews may have searched CTR, but found nothing and therefore did not report this part of their process.
Limitations stated by the reviewer(s):
No additional limitations detected by the reviewers.
Study Type:
Single study
Related Chapters:
Clinical Effectiveness
Tags:
Ongoing trials
Clinical trial registries
ClinicalTrials.gov
ICTRP