On 2016 Aug 23, Ben Goldacre commented:

This article has two incorrect trial registry IDs associated with it on PubMed: both in the XML on PubMed, and in the originating journal article. The first incorrect ID given is NCT00209795. We believe the correct ID, which we have found by hand searching, is NCT00209794.

The second ID given is NCT88523834. This trial ID does not appear in clinicaltrials.gov. We have contacted the corresponding author on the study to ask them for the correct trial ID on 18/08/2016, but received no reply. We have also searched manually for this trial on clinicaltrials.gov and found no matching study. We therefore believe that this trial may not have not been registered on ClinicalTrials.gov.

This comment is being posted as part of the OpenTrials.net project^[1] , an open database threading together all publicly accessible documents and data on each trial, globally. In the course of creating the database, and matching documents and data sources about trials from different locations, we have identified various anomalies in datasets such as PubMed, and in published papers. Alongside documenting the prevalence of problems, we are also attempting to correct these errors and anomalies wherever possible, by feeding back to the originators. We have corrected this data in the OpenTrials.net database; we hope that this trial’s text and metadata can also be corrected at source, in PubMed and in the accompanying paper.

Many thanks,

Jessica Fleminger, Ben Goldacre*

[1] Goldacre, B., Gray, J., 2016. OpenTrials: towards a collaborative open database of all available information on all clinical trials. Trials 17. doi:10.1186/s13063-016-1290-8 PMID: 27056367

* Dr Ben Goldacre BA MA MSc MBBS MRCPsych<br> Senior Clinical Research Fellow<br> ben.goldacre@phc.ox.ac.uk<br> www.ebmDataLab.net<br> Centre for Evidence Based Medicine<br> Department of Primary Care Health Sciences<br> University of Oxford<br> Radcliffe Observatory Quarter<br> Woodstock Road<br> Oxford OX2 6GG

On 2016 Aug 23, Ben Goldacre commented:

This article has two incorrect trial registry IDs associated with it on PubMed: both in the XML on PubMed, and in the originating journal article. The first incorrect ID given is NCT00209795. We believe the correct ID, which we have found by hand searching, is NCT00209794.

The second ID given is NCT88523834. This trial ID does not appear in clinicaltrials.gov. We have contacted the corresponding author on the study to ask them for the correct trial ID on 18/08/2016, but received no reply. We have also searched manually for this trial on clinicaltrials.gov and found no matching study. We therefore believe that this trial may not have not been registered on ClinicalTrials.gov.

This comment is being posted as part of the OpenTrials.net project^[1] , an open database threading together all publicly accessible documents and data on each trial, globally. In the course of creating the database, and matching documents and data sources about trials from different locations, we have identified various anomalies in datasets such as PubMed, and in published papers. Alongside documenting the prevalence of problems, we are also attempting to correct these errors and anomalies wherever possible, by feeding back to the originators. We have corrected this data in the OpenTrials.net database; we hope that this trial’s text and metadata can also be corrected at source, in PubMed and in the accompanying paper.

Many thanks,

Jessica Fleminger, Ben Goldacre*

[1] Goldacre, B., Gray, J., 2016. OpenTrials: towards a collaborative open database of all available information on all clinical trials. Trials 17. doi:10.1186/s13063-016-1290-8 PMID: 27056367

* Dr Ben Goldacre BA MA MSc MBBS MRCPsych<br> Senior Clinical Research Fellow<br> ben.goldacre@phc.ox.ac.uk<br> www.ebmDataLab.net<br> Centre for Evidence Based Medicine<br> Department of Primary Care Health Sciences<br> University of Oxford<br> Radcliffe Observatory Quarter<br> Woodstock Road<br> Oxford OX2 6GG