TrialScout links published results to trial registrations using a large language model

Multiple stakeholders need to locate results of registered clinical trials but frequently struggle to find them. Summary results of clinical trials are often not published in trial registries, and publications containing trial results are often not explicitly linked to their respective trial registrations. Finding these results is important to researchers, systematic reviewers, research funders, regulators, clinical practitioners, and patients.

We developed TrialScout, a computer program that uses a large language model to match clinical trials registered on ClinicalTrials.gov with corresponding result publications indexed in PubMed. TrialScout's performance was evaluated through comparison to human-coded matches from previous studies of results reporting rates. Subsequently, TrialScout was applied in a cross-sectional analysis of a random sample of 9,600 completed or terminated trials.

TrialScout had a sensitivity of 92.5% and a specificity of 81.2% compared to human coders. Manual review of 200 cases where TrialScout disagreed with human researchers showed that a majority (123/200, 61.5%, 95% CI, 54.4-68.3%) of disagreements were due to human errors. When used on 9,600 sampled trials in ClinicalTrials.gov, TrialScout found result publications for 6,110 (63.6%) of trials.

TrialScout reliably located results of completed clinical trials. The tool offers benefits in terms of speed and efficiency. Estimating TrialScout's accuracy is limited by the lack of a true gold standard. TrialScout can accelerate the process of locating trial results in the scientific literature and can assist in monitoring trial reporting practices.