Failure to Post Clinical Trial Results: A Serious Threat to Public Trust

Majority of registered clinical trials fail to post their data even after a year of completion. No other causal factor appears to explain this failure adequately so that deliberate selective reporting in commercial interest is most likely to be involved. Since regulators, journal editors and academics appear to have failed to arrest this trend, citizen science needs to take active steps and challenge the concerned researchers, regulators and journal editors too. Most clinical trials are funded by pharma companies and therefore a financial interest is inevitable. There for there are stringent norms and regulations on clinical trials. All clinical trials need to be pre-registered specifying a number of details about the proposed plan. The study design as well as appropriate updates are to be made public on the registry portals. The portals have a mandatory provision and expectation to make the summary of results public[1]. Being in public domain, any claims made from the trials are verifiable and this is a sound and necessary scientific norm. However, notwithstanding the mandate, a vast majority of clinical trials do not post their summary results data even after a year or more from the date of completion. Our exploration of _clinicaltrials.gov_ for six diseases revealed that between two third to three forth of interventional trials completed before March 2025, (so that they have more than one year time to post their data) had not posted their results (Table 1).