Journal of clinical epidemiology
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Despite their essential role in collecting and organizing published medical literature, indexed search engines are unable to cover all relevant knowledge. Hence, current literature recommends the inclusion of clinical trial registries in systematic reviews (SRs). This study aims to provide an automated approach to extend a search on PubMed to the ClinicalTrials.gov database, relying on text mining and machine learning techniques. ⋯ The proposed machine learning instrument has the potential to help researchers identify relevant studies in the SR process by reducing workload, without losing sensitivity and at a small price in terms of specificity.