Berlin Institute of Health at Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin, QUEST Center for Responsible Research, Berlin, Germany.
PLoS One. 2022 Jul 1;17(7):e0270909. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0270909. eCollection 2022.
Historical clinical trial registry data can only be retrieved by manually accessing individual clinical trials through registry websites. This limits the feasibility, accuracy and reproducibility of certain kinds of research on clinical trial activity and presents challenges to the transparency of the enterprise of human research. This paper presents cthist, a novel, free and open source R package that enables automated scraping of clinical trial registry entry histories and returns structured data for analysis. Documentation of the implementation of the package cthist is provided, as well as 3 brief case studies with example code.
历史临床试验注册数据只能通过手动访问注册网站上的各个临床试验来检索。这限制了某些类型的临床试验活动研究的可行性、准确性和可重复性,并对人类研究企业的透明度提出了挑战。本文介绍了 cthist,这是一个新颖的、免费的开源 R 包,它可以自动抓取临床试验注册条目历史记录,并返回用于分析的结构化数据。提供了对 cthist 包实现的文档说明,以及 3 个带有示例代码的简短案例研究。