FAQ
Enter a keyword into the main search bar and click Find Trials. If you want to search for an exact phrase, enclose it in double quotes i.e. “xxx xxx”
For a more complex search you can use the special characters below.
Alternatively, click Advanced Search and four options will appear – Find Trials by ID; Find Trials by Title; Find Trials by Intervention and Find Trials by Condition. Enter the exact phrase in one of these fields and click the corresponding ‘Find Trials’ button.
| Operator | Description |
|---|---|
| “” | Surrounding words; search for the exact phrase. This allows you to search for words in a specific sequence with spaces. |
| * | Wildcard at the end of the word; allows you to search for partial words. E.g., investigat* will find both investigate and investigation |
| + | Used before a word, the word must be present. |
| – | Used before a word, the word must not be present. |
| > | Used before a word, the word must be present and increase its ranking effect on the results. |
| < | Used before a word, the word must be present and decrease its ranking effect on the results. |
| ( ) | Surrounding words, group them into subexpressions (allowing them to be included, excluded, ranked, and so forth as a group). |
| ~ | Used before a word, negate a word’s ranking value. |
On the Search Results, it will indicate how many trials matched on the search criteria entered. To find out more information on a trial, click MORE and a new page will appear with further details about this study. Alternatively, to view a limited amount of information about the study, click EXPAND and this information will appear in the same screen.
Details of Irish sites where the trial is active are displayed at the bottom of the display page for the trial.
In some cases, if a study is being performed in multiple countries, the database will return individual records for each of these countries. By looking at the Trial ID, the country extension will be the last two characters. In the case for Ireland, this will be IE.
In some cases the trial may have been registered on different clinical trial registries which feed their information to the World Health Organisation database, so the same trial may be registered with a different Trial Id in say Europe and the US.
The information contained in the NCTD is provided by the World Health Organisation (WHO) from their International Clinical Trials Registry Platform (ICTRP), which receives data about clinical trials from a large number of national and international clinical trial registries.
Trials are then updated by Irish investigators with information about the sites/hospitals where the trial is active.
Click on the SUBMIT TRIAL DATA tab and enter details as required. Please note that those fields asterisked are mandatory. You must supply the trial id as recorded on the original trial registry, for example the EudraCT identifier.
Data submitted will be verified by the NCTD before being updated to the database.
Data updates are received on a weekly basis from the WHO.
