Author:
Dr. Alexander Villafranca | Grande Prairie Regional College | Canada
Introduction: Clinical trials are often given acronymic names to increase participant enrollment and study impact. Indeed, named trials are more frequently cited and achieve greater sample sizes. Critics argue that trial names could promote therapeutic misconception/misestimation by giving false impressions regarding study benefits, safety, and conclusiveness. Additionally, reusing names could undermine bibliographic searches and cause confusion. A psycholinguistic analysis of trial names is needed to identify how often they are reused, how often they contain words related to concepts such as certainty and reward, and whether reused names are more likely to contain these concerning words.
Methods: All 383,977 records from clinicaltrials.gov were downloaded. Trial acronyms were extracted and analyzed using LIWC psycholinguistic software. The proportion of names relating to certainty, causality, achievement, power, reward, risk, and health was compared between reused and unique names using chi-square. The most common names associated with each linguistic classification were noted.
Outcome: 103,549 trials had names, of which 31,125 (30.1%) were reused an average of 13 times. Reused names were more likely to contain words related to certainty, causality, achievement, power, reward, and risk, and less likely to contain words involving health (all p < 0.0001). Most frequent names included: Certainty-PROMISE/PRECISE/CLEAR; Causality-REACT/CHANGE/EFFECT; Achievement-IMPROVE/ACE/RECOVER; Power-BEST/TOP/CHAMP; Reward-ACCESS/OPTIMAL/BEST; Risk-PREVENT/TRUST/SAFE; Health-VITAL/LIFE/HEAL. The most common repeat names across the entire corpus were IMPACT/COVID-19/RCT.
Conclusions: Reused trial names are prevalent, and more often contain concerning linguistic characteristics. Consideration should be given to setting rules for trial name selection and re-use to avoid misunderstandings, confusion, and accusations of manipulative intent.