Making it less of a trial to find important medical evidence: Faculty of 1000 launch F1000Trials

As randomized controlled trials and systematic reviews in healthcare have grown in their number and influence, there is an increasing need to identify those studies which should change how physicians treat their patients – and those which should not. F1000Trials extends the widely-recognized system of peer-nominated experts identifying great research in biology and medicine pioneered by F1000Prime. In F1000Trials, the F1000 Faculty Members provide expert assessment of newly published trial articles and write short reviews, recommending the most noteworthy by assigning star ratings and highlighting those which change clinical practice.

Faculty of 1000 Managing Director Anne Greenwood said: "There is an increasing amount of information about clinical trials being shared online but it can be difficult to search, compare, and understand. F1000Trials will help many different users of the medical literature - including practicing clinicians, clinical researchers, health policy makers, librarians, pharmacists, regulators, patient organizations and the pharmaceutical industry – to easily find out which clinical trials matter most and where all the key publications can be found."

Clinical trials can produce numerous publications about the same trial, scattered and disconnected across different journals and databases. F1000Trials makes it easier to find clinical trials by providing links to all publications known about a particular trial that are included in the largest bibliographic life science database, PubMed. Links to trial registration databases are also included, helping to create an electronic "threaded publication trail" about clinical trials.

Prof Peter Sandercock, University of Edinburgh, said: "I'm delighted that F1000 will, by linking and alerting us to new trial publications, contribute to greater transparency and efficiency in reporting and disseminating results of trials. This alerting mechanism will also facilitate prompt updating of systematic reviews of trials."

F1000Trials provides a powerful search engine, allowing users to search instantly across all known generic names and brand names of particular drugs, as well as search for specific studies, diseases and conditions. F1000Trials identifies and tags articles that report negative or null results - important studies for providing complete medical evidence, which can be difficult to identify with current literature searching tools.

Speaking of the launch of F1000Trials, award-winning writer and researcher Dr Ben Goldacre said: "We urgently need more transparency around clinical trial results, to avoid negative results being withheld. But we also need more engagement by clinicians and the public with all trials research. Tools like F1000Trials are an important part of that movement, away from the bad old days of trial results being entirely inaccessible, or - almost as bad – sitting in long technical documents, that busy clinicians may not have time to read."

F1000Trials is currently in its public "beta" phase, and is free to access to anyone who registers on the website. Faculty of 1000 invites all people interested in improving how we access and communicate information about clinical trials to try out F1000Trials and send their feedback.