regCOVID: Tracking publications of registered COVID-19 studies

Abstract

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic many clinical studies have been initiated leading to the need for efficient ways to track and analyze study results. We expanded our previous project that tracked registered COVID-19 clinical studies to also track result articles generated from these studies. We conducted searches of ClinicalTrials.gov and PubMed to identify articles linked to COVID-19 studies, and developed criteria based on the trial phase, intervention, location, and record recency to develop a prioritized list of result publications. We found 760 articles linked to 419 interventional trials (15.7% of all 2 669 COVID-19 interventional trials as of 15 August 2021), with 418 identified via abstract-link in PubMed and 342 via registry-link in ClinicalTrials.gov. Of the 419 trials publishing at least one article, 123 (29.4%) have multiple linked publications. We used an attention score to develop a prioritized list of all publications linked to COVID-19 trials and identified 58 publications that are result articles from late phase (Phase 3) trials with at least one US site and multiple study record updates. For COVID-19 vaccine trials, we found 69 linked result articles for 40 trials (13.9% of 290 total COVID-19 vaccine trials). Our method allows for the efficient identification of important COVID-19 articles that report results of registered clinical trials and are connected via a structured article-trial link.