RCTs are a crucial element of EBM and we’ve had a ‘filter’ for them for years. This allows a user to search and click the ‘Controlled trials’ filter and the results will only show clinical trials.  It’s one of our most used filters.

In the earliest iteration we used our own search filter to identify trials in PubMed and added them to Trip. This was ok, but lots of false negatives (missed trials) and false positives (identified papers as trials which weren’t).  A few years ago we started using the RCTs identified by the wonderful RobotReviewer team.  This used machine learning and made the results dramatically better.

Over the weekend we’ve used the latest version of the RobotReviewer code to make the identification of trials the most accurate yet!  Previously we had identified 479,197 trials but now it’s up to 532,479.  We had thousands of trials labelled as trials which no longer are and thousands we had previously missed. There were also a load of new trials that weren’t in Trip.

This is a brilliant piece of work and we’re indebted to RobotReviewer – thank you.

Summary: We have an easy to search collection of over half a million clinical trials!