Mega-project to detect missing clinical trial results across five European countries

A new project will systematically evaluate the reporting of results from clinical trials at all medical universities and university hospitals across Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden.

According to the study protocol, the project team will identify all trials led by one or several Nordic universities or university hospitals that were completed between 2016-2019, and then search trial registries and the academic literature for their results.

For each trial, the project will document whether, when and where its results were made public.

Outreach to institutions and regulators

Rather than just burying their findings in an academic journal, the researchers will proactively share their data with key stakeholders:

“We will also communicate our results to stakeholders involved with clinical trials using specialist journals for science and medicine, as well as open seminars/webinars/workshops and in social media…”

“[We] will share our preprint and open dataset with the national medicines regulator and national ethics umbrella body (if applicable) in each Nordic country as well as with the clinical trial unit of each institution.”

“Data and code used for analyses in this study will be shared openly…”

How does it work?

The study design is broadly similar to that of two previous academic mega-projects in Germany, which found that hundreds of clinical trials run by German universities had never made their results public (see here and here, related dataset here).

The project has a sophisticated search strategy, but will not validate its findings with institutions or with individual investigators.

The Nordic trials project is expected to launch before the end of this year. The study protocol is available online.

Please note that the Nordic trials project is being run by academic researchers.

This is not a TranspariMED project.