It has been a while but lots has happen:

We are proud to announce that the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) has accepted to fund the COVID-evidence initiative. The COVID-evidence team is extremely grateful to the SNSF for their support.

In continuation of our collaboration with the Core Outcome Measures in Effectiveness Trials initiative (COMET), we are happy to report that the COMET group has started working on the development of core outcome set(s) for COVID-19 prevention studies (COS-COVID-P).

We are also more than delighted to have been invited to join the Evidence Collaborative for COVID-19 network coordinated by the World Health Organisation.

The COVID-evidence BASIC database now contains 2799 trials testing interventions to prevent or treat COVID-19. Please keep in mind that only records tagged as “manual extraction completed” have been finalized by human extraction. For more information on the procedures please visit the project’s directory on OSF.

We are working hard on optimizing the automatic extractions and have expanded our team. Soon we will offer additional filters and algorithms to improve the applicability and searching of the database. If you would like to see a specific filter implemented please reach out to the team.

The COVID-evidence BASIC database has been UPDATED and now contains more than 1150 trials testing interventions to prevent or treat COVID-19.

For almost 800 trials we finalized the human data extraction and cleaning including all trials planned in the first 100 days of the pandemic - the rest is based on automatic trial tracking only (please use carefully).

We currently add further specific details on type of interventions, settings and specific outcome types.

In close collaboration with the QUEST Center for transforming biomedical research (BIH - Berlin Institute of Health) and the Covid-19 TrialsTracker project (Evidence-Based Medicine DataLab / CEBM at University of Oxford) we are working on a second Expansion Module on trial publication and transparency.

We will extract specific information aiming to better understand how clinical research is disseminated in this specific pandemic situation - and how the lessons learned may influence reporting of clinical trials in the long term.

More soon.

The COVID-evidence BASIC database now includes PREPRINTS.

We screened in collaboration with the Institute for Evidence in Medicine (University of Freiburg, Germany) preprints from medRxiv and bioRxiv and will now continuously update the COVID-evidence BASIC database with information on trials from preprints.

The current datasources include:

PubMed
WHO Literature database
medRxiv and bioRxiv
ClinicalTrials.gov
WHO International Clinical Trials Registry Platform (ICTRP)
Swissethics (approved clinical trials and research projects)

The details on the study flow are reported at OSF.

The COVID-evidence BASIC database has been UPDATED and now contains 1019 studies!

559 trials testing interventions to prevent or treat COVID-19 were included and extracted by human reviewers. COVID-evidence BASIC shows the extractions of basic information for them.

A few trials characteristics (detailed report coming soon!):
- 283 are ongoing trials while 19 have already been completed
- The top two countries in number of trials are China (n=338) and the USA (n=47)
- The majority of the trials are randomized (n= 386) versus non-randomized (n=146)
- The majority of the trials are parallel trials (n=381) versus single-arm (n=93)

460 further studies were found to be potentially relevant by automatic extraction algorithms and are awaiting assessment by our expert reviewers.
The details on the study flow are reported at OSF and more info on the status of the data (human/manual vs automatic/algorithm) is in the FAQ.

We are thankful for the collaboration with the Core Outcome Measures in Effectiveness Trials initiative (COMET). Core Outcome Sets (COS) are a minimal set of outcomes that should be measured and reported in each trial. As many clinical trials and systematic reviews on COVID-19 are underway, COVID-19 specific COS will ensure that this evidence base will contain the key information needed by decision makers about the effects of interventions.

In April, COMET reported on the meta-Core Outcome Set for hospitalized adult patients with COVID-19 by bringing together all COS developers and agreeing on the overlap of these project. The COVID-evidence initiative has been closely collaborating with COMET to make sure all outcomes (and meta-COS) will be collected comprehensively in clear outcome domains by using an internationally recognized taxonomy.  

We are proud to announce that our first expansion module will be launched soon, dedicated to the outcomes and meta-core-outcomes reported in COVID-19 trials. We aim to provide a clear overview of all outcomes and core-outcomes being measured in COVID-19 trials in order to inform and ease the development of any future trials and living systematic reviews and meta-analyses.

Our review team is working in parallel in 5 time zones to continuously update the COVID-evidence BASIC database. It has currently 592 studies preliminary included. It is "preliminary" because we combine human extractions with automatic processes and algorithms:

274 trials testing interventions to prevent or treat COVID-19 were included by human reviewers. COVID-evidence BASIC shows the extractions of basic information for them.

318 further studies were found to be potentially relevant by automatic extraction algorithms and are awaiting assessment by our expert reviewers. These entries need to be interpreted with caution because in our experience, such automatic extractions from registries sometimes require human judgement to adequately classify them. However, it is very likely that they are accurately included as trials testing interventions to prevent or treat COVID-19.

The details on the study flow are reported at OSF and more info on the status of the data (human/manual vs automatic/algorithm) is in the FAQ.

What's next: Updates and Expansion Modules

Our data scientists and software engineers work on automatic updates, integrating additional sources and continuously adapting the algorithms to prefill the data items for COVID-evidence BASIC. We will soon add the remaining data sources and then chronologically update the already included ones in order to be most up-to-date for all trials.

COVID-evidence BASIC is the first step of COVID-evidence, aiming to provide a catalogue of planned, ongoing and completed trials. However, it is just the basis.

We now initiated the next step, the "Expansion Modules" (see FAQ). With such modules we will provide more details to dig deeper and go beyond of a catalogue of trials, focusing on more detailed questions.

We will present more details very soon.

Our team of reviewers and collaborators is growing.

We are very delighted that TranspariMED is actively supporting us in our goal to create synergies and collaboration on a global scale.

Thank you!

Depending on your specific needs and interests, additional collections of COVID-19 data may be of help. We now list some of the initiatives and related projects on the website.

We have also added some answers to frequently asked questions about COVID-evidence. Please let us know if there are more we should address.

As of today, you will be able to search the beta-version of our newly established database of planned, ongoing, and completed trials on COVID-19 available from publications, trial registries, pre-print servers and ethics committee approvals.

As we write, we are working to add up-to-date trials and further data sources. The data extraction by human reviewers is ongoing. The visualization of the database is preliminary and will be updated. Several expansions are planned and will be added soon.

All updates will be announced here and on twitter (@covidevidence).

Thank you for visiting!