# Same, same, but different: A method to harmonise and deduplicate study records from WHO ICTRP and ClinicalTrials.gov prior to screening

## TL;DR

This paper introduces a method to efficiently deduplicate clinical trial records from WHO ICTRP and ClinicalTrials.gov in EndNote.

## Contribution

A novel, step-by-step method to deduplicate clinical trial registry records in EndNote, reducing errors in automated deduplication.

## Key findings

- Registry records are harder to deduplicate than journal articles due to differences in data structure and content.
- The proposed method includes seven steps to harmonize and deduplicate records in EndNote.
- The method aims to reduce the risk of incorrectly removing duplicate registry records.

## Abstract

Trials registry records represent a challenge in deduplication compared to deduplicating studies reported in journals and exported from bibliographic databases such as MEDLINE. We demonstrate why this is the case and propose a method to deduplicate registry records from the WHO International Clinical Trials Registry Platform (ICTRP) and ClinicalTrials.gov (CTG) specifically in the reference management tool EndNote (desktop version). We believe that our method is not only more efficient but that it will minimise the risk of registry records being incorrectly removed as duplicates in automated deduplication. The method has seven steps and is detailed in this tutorial as a step-by-step guide.