MétaCan
Menu
Back to cohort
Record W4410880804 · doi:10.2196/72015

Seek and Ye Shall Not Find (Yet): Searching Clinical Trial Registries for Trials Designed With Patients—A Call to Action

2025· article· en· W4410880804 on OpenAlexvenueno aff
Karen L. Woolley, James Woolley, Mark James Woolley

Bibliographic record

VenueJournal of Participatory Medicine · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldMedicine
TopicEthics in Clinical Research
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsClinical trialPlain languageMedicineCall to actionAlternative medicineAction (physics)Perspective (graphical)Computer sciencePathologyArtificial intelligenceBusiness

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Unlabelled: Clinical trial registries were designed to help patients search for potentially suitable clinical trials. When our family faced another serious cancer diagnosis, we searched multiple international clinical trial registries. Despite increasing evidence that trials designed with patients can be better for trial participants (eg, they can have more relevant outcome measures and fewer burdens), it is currently impossible to search registries for these specific types of trials. In this Patient Perspective article, we make the first "call to action" for clinical trial registries to include (1) a filter that allows for efficient searching for clinical trials designed with patients and (2) structured information, in plain language, on how patients were involved. We propose how these two innovations could help reduce barriers to clinical trial participation. We also highlight how new regulatory and ethical guidelines are encouraging patient involvement in trial design, and we identify the benefits to many of doing so. Given the pressing need to improve clinical trial participation, we respectfully call on the clinical trial community to respond to our call to action and consider our proposed action plan. Ideally, when patients want to search for clinical trials designed with patients for patients, we should be able to find them. A plain language summary for this publication is available in the supplementary material for this paper.

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 machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.372
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.528
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMetaresearch
Consensus categoriesMetaresearch
DomainCandidate signal: Methods · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.628
Threshold uncertainty score0.774

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.3720.528
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.001
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0020.002
Bibliometrics0.0010.002
Science and technology studies0.0120.036
Scholarly communication0.0250.025
Open science0.0050.022
Research integrity0.0400.042
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0100.007

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.

Opus teacher head0.886
GPT teacher head0.713
Teacher spread0.174 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; the direct Gemma label and the distilled Codex classifier agree on what is shown here.

Study designObservational
DomainMethods
GenreEmpirical

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".

Quick stats

Citations2
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

Explore more

Same venueJournal of Participatory MedicineSame topicEthics in Clinical ResearchFrench-language works237,207