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I've actually written a search crawler for clinicaltrials.gov. Their XML format is fairly convenient for parsing. I never thought for mining those types of data-points though. I suppose you could look at the study completion status and whether results are posted or not http://www.clinicaltrialweb.com

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My experience of the status on clinicaltrials.gov is that it isn't always accurate. I don't think too much effort is put into keeping the data current.

I think there's a lot of potential for meta-analyses...do a Google search for those that have been done by academia...I've seen some use the ClinicalTrials data as a proxy for seeing which diseases seem profitable enough to cure, or to see trends in the methodology of trial being done. It seems like an area in which a tech-savvy person could make inroads, as some of the scholarly research may not be done with the most efficient forms of data-gathering (i.e. not many scientists are programmers)

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