ctrdata for aggregating and analysing clinical trials

The package ctrdata provides functions for retrieving (downloading) information on clinical trials from public registers, and for aggregating and analysing this information. Use with R for the European Union Clinical Trials Register (“EUCTR”, https://www.clinicaltrialsregister.eu/) and ClinicalTrials.gov (“CTGOV”, https://clinicaltrials.gov/). The motivation is to understand trends in design and conduct of trials, their availability for patients and their detailled results. The package is to be used within the R system.

Last reviewed on 2020-10-17 for version 1.4

Main features:

• Protocol-related trial information is easily retrieved (downloaded): Users define a query in a register’s web interface and then use ctrdata to retrieve in one step all trials resulting from the query. Results-related trial information and personal annotations can be including during retrieval. Synonyms of an active substance can also be found.

• Retrieved (downloaded) trial information is transformed and stored in a document-centric database, for fast and offline access. Uses RSQLite, local or remote MongoDB servers, via R package nodbi. Easily re-run a previous query to update a database.

• Analysis can be done with R (using ctrdata convenience functions) or others systems. Unique (de-duplicated) trial records are identified across registers. ctrdata can merge and recode information (fields) and also provides easy access even to deeply-nested fields (