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Linked Clinical Trials initiative gathers momentum

Kirsty Meddings – 2016 June 21

In Clinical TrialsCrossmarkIdentifiersLinkingMetadata

We now have linked clinical trials deposits coming in from five publishers: BioMedCentral, BMJ, Elsevier, National Institute for Health Research and PLOS. It’s still a relatively small pool of metadata - around 4000 DOIs with associated clinical trial numbers - but we’re delighted to see that “threads” of publications are already starting to form.

If you look at this article in The Lancet and click on the Crossmark button you will see that in the Clinical Trials section there are links to three other articles reporting on the same trial: two from the American Heart Journal and one from BMJ’s Heart. Readers can navigate between these four articles in three separate journals using the Crossmark functionality- a new set of links and routes for discovery have appeared.

In another example, three articles from PLOS ONE are threaded together around a trial for the treatment of Type 1 diabetes. And here another PLOS journal, Neglected Tropical Diseases links through to a PLOS ONE article about the same trial.

If you publish in the health sciences please do consider joining this exciting initiative so that we can expand these threads and build up the metadata. Read the tech specs here or drop me an email if you have questions.