Reporting summary results in clinical trial registries: updated guidance from WHO
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The importance of publicly registering clinical trials and reporting their results in registries is widely recognised. While substantial progress has been made with registering trials before enrolment, the availability of results in registries remains uncommon despite expanding legislative and funder requirements-leading to an incomplete evidence base and avoidable waste of resources, particularly for unpublished trials. This paper discusses the rationale for reporting summary results in trial registries, reviews the current landscape of registry policies, and presents new WHO guidance for reporting results in registries. The 2025 WHO guidance was developed after consultation with relevant parties, including researchers, patients, sponsors, funders, regulators, journal editors, registry administrators, and the public. The guidance defines eight minimum items that are essential for understanding and interpreting the summary results for all trials. Implementation of the WHO guidance by trial registries, broad adherence by investigators and sponsors, and endorsement by funders, regulators, legislators, research ethics committees, patient organisations, and journals can help enhance the contribution of trials to scientific knowledge, patient care, and health policy.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.127 | 0.053 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.012 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".