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Record W4413883169 · doi:10.1186/s12916-025-04328-z

Practice of data sharing plans in clinical trial registrations and concordance between registered and published data sharing plans: a cross-sectional study

2025· article· en· W4413883169 on OpenAlexaff
Jingyi Zhang, Barbara E. Bierer, Harriette G.C. Van Spall, Yingxin Liu, Xuerui Bai, Lehana Thabane, Gregory Y. H. Lip, Xin Sun, David Moher, Guowei Li

Bibliographic record

VenueBMC Medicine · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldMedicine
TopicEthics in Clinical Research
Canadian institutionsOttawa HospitalUniversity of OttawaSt. Joseph’s Healthcare HamiltonImpactMcMaster UniversityPopulation Health Research Institute
FundersNatural Science Foundation of Guangdong ProvinceNational Natural Science Foundation of China
KeywordsMedicineClinical trialConcordanceData sharingFamily medicineTrial registrationPoolingMEDLINEAlternative medicinePsychological interventionInternal medicinePathology

Abstract

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BACKGROUND: The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) recommends that trial authors must specify data sharing plans when trials are registered and published, yet this uptake remains unclear. We aimed to assess the practice of data sharing plans in trial registration platforms and the concordance between registered and published data sharing plans. METHODS: We included clinical trials published between 2021 and 2023 in six high-profile journals (The Lancet, The New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, BMJ, JAMA Internal Medicine, and Annals of Internal Medicine) that enrolled participants no earlier than 2019 and registered on clinical trial platforms. One study outcome was data sharing plans in the trial registration platform, where trials clearly responding a "yes" to "Plan to share" were considered as planning to share data (including study protocols, statistical analysis plans, analytic codes, and individual participant data). The concordance between registered and published plans to share data was also assessed, which included plans to either share data (Yes/Yes) and not to share data (No/No) in both registration and publications. Univariate analyses were used to assess associations between trial characteristics and registered plans to share data and between trial characteristics and concordance. RESULTS: Of the 383 included registration IDs, only 44.6% (171/383) planned to share data in registration. Trials with drug versus non-drug interventions had increased odds of registering plans to share data (OR = 2.71, 95% CI: 1.63, 4.63). There were seven trial publications, each pooling two trials and having two registration IDs. We selected the registration IDs with a later start date, resulting in 376 trial publications for concordance assessment. Over half (216/376, 57.4%) had discordance between registration and publications. COVID-19-related trials were associated with decreased odds of data sharing concordance (OR = 0.59, 95% CI: 0.37, 0.91). Additionally, significant discordance was consistently found in statistical analysis plans or study protocols, analytic codes, and individual participant data. CONCLUSIONS: Most registered trials do not specify plans to share data. More than half of published trials have data sharing discordance between registration and publication. Efforts are required to improve the reporting and reliability of plans to share clinical trial data. TRIAL REGISTRATION: This study was registered on the Open Science Framework ( https://osf.io/k6etb ).

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

Direct model labels (unvalidated)

Per-model category and study-design labels from the labeling rounds. They are machine output, unvalidated, and the disagreement between models ships as data. No study design here is MEDLINE-validated yet.

Model armCategoriesStudy designConfidence
gemmaMetaresearchOpen science
Domain: Reproducibility · Genre: Empirical
About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: no
Observationalhigh
gptMetaresearchOpen science
Domain: Reporting · Genre: Empirical
About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: no
Observationalhigh
models agreeAgreement compares identical category sets and study designs across arms.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.048
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.331
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMetaresearch, Research integrity
Consensus categoriesMetaresearch
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: Observational
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.283
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0480.331
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.001
Science and technology studies0.0000.001
Scholarly communication0.0000.001
Open science0.0020.004
Research integrity0.0000.002
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

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 head0.865
GPT teacher head0.690
Teacher spread0.176 · 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

Labeled directly by 2 models reading the full record.

Study designObservational
DomainReproducibility · Reporting
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

Citations0
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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