C02

Searching Clinical Trials.gov, the WHO portal and other trials registers and regulatory sources to improve the reliability of systematic reviews

June 6, 2016 Monday

ROOM B

9.00-12.30

Carol LEFEBVRE
Lefebvre Associates, Oxford, UK

Title

Searching ClinicalTrials.gov, the WHO portal and other trials registers and regulatory sources to improve the reliability of systematic reviews.

Targeted Audiences

This workshop is aimed at librarians and information specialists supporting systematic reviews and other clinical and / or research work.

Level

Medium / advanced.
Search experience (such as use of Boolean Operators) is desirable but no previous experience of searching trials registers is required for this course.

Aims and outcomes

The aim of this workshop is to improve attendees’ awareness of the two main clinical trials registers (ClinicalTrials.gov, the WHO portal), to improve their search skills in these two resources and to improve their understanding of the importance of searching clinical trials registers in general and ClinicalTrials.gov and the WHO portal in particular, when undertaking searches to support systematic reviews. The outcome will be librarians and information specialists who are better-equipped to support the systemic review process and systematic reviews that are more reliable and robust.

Description / agenda

Clinical trials registers are becoming widely established as key knowledge sources. Many countries and regions have developed registers over recent years and many pharmaceutical companies now maintain their own registers as well as contributing to international initiatives such as ClinicalTrials.gov and the WHO portal. But how comprehensive are these trials registers? Which trials registers do we need to search? What other methods, such a regulatory sources, do we need to use to make sure that key trials are not missed by specific searches? The above issues will be addressed in presentations, discussion and guided exercises.

Equipment requirements

This workshop is a combination of presentations, discussion and ‘hands-on’ learning, so participants should bring their own laptops (or similar) to search trials registers which are openly accessible on the internet.

Course Leader

Carol Lefebvre is an independent information consultant and was previously the Senior Information Specialist at the UK Cochrane Centre from 1992 to 2012, where she was involved in founding The Cochrane Collaboration in 1993. She is Co-convenor of the Cochrane Information Retrieval Methods Group, serves on the Cochrane Methods Executive and is lead author on the searching chapter of The Cochrane Handbook.

She is a health sciences librarian by background and was the deputy librarian at the University of Oxford Medical School Library from 1986 before joining Cochrane in 1992. She was awarded an M.Sc. in Library and Information Science from the University of Loughborough in 1985 and an Honorary Fellowship of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals in 2007. She is also a Senior Associate Member of the Royal Society of Medicine.

Since 2012, she has served as the US Medical Library Association (MLA) Representative to EAHIL. She has also served as a Councillor for EAHIL and has been a frequent speaker and CE course facilitator at EAHIL conferences and workshops and other international conferences since the mid-1990s.

Since starting her own company in 2012, she now focusses on teaching and consultancy in information retrieval for evidence synthesis, such as systematic reviews, health technology assessment and guideline development. She has been teaching courses on searching trials registers since 2009.

She is a member of the InterTASC Information Specialists’ Sub-Group (ISSG), a group of information professionals who support research groups within England and Scotland providing technology assessments to the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE). Carol is also one of the editorial team that maintains the InterTASC ISSG Search Filter Resource. She also serves as Associate Editor of the journal Research Synthesis Methods.

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