Clinical Trials Network Tutorial

For up to date issues or problems with this database please see the wiki.
For more information, please visit the Clinical Trails Network.

The Clinical Trials Network (CTN) Data Share web site is an electronic environment that allows data from completed clinical trials to be distributed to investigators in order to promote new research, encourage further analyses, and disseminate information to the community. Secondary analyses produced from data sharing multiply the scientific contribution of the original research.

Effective data sharing includes communicating to the research community that data are available, providing sufficient descriptive information about the data, enforcing compliance to standard semantics and structure, rendering the data in a usable format, and making data accessible.

To access these data from the NIF interface, one can search for various behaviors; below, we search for smoking. Note, if we allow NIF to autocomplete on our term, the system automatically fills in a list of synonyms.

Under the Data Type > Dataset we find two datasets available from the CTN site. Clicking on the first item, we are taken to the CTN site, where the full datasets from this study can be downloaded.

In this case, the protocol as well as data files and several manuscripts are available.

Clicking on the green data files link will allow the researcher to download the file. Note, when downloading datasets an individual researcher will be asked to fill out a brief form that will need to be approved by the CTN staff.

For more information, please visit the Clinical Trials Network.