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Links to Clinical Trials
“Tagging” Clinical Trial Descriptions in JATS means tagging external links to clinical
trial descriptions that identify the Clinical Trial registry and have a Crossref or
other identifier for the trial. Clinical trial registration information from https://clinicaltrials.gov/ is typically displayed as a simple link plus the registration number, e.g.:
Trial registration: NCT02442440 (https://register.clinicaltrials.gov/)
In JATS tagging, there are two convenient ways to encode this information: as a simple
<ext-link> or as a more complex link using an <related-object> element.
As an External Link
When a clinical trial link is just a typical link to a known resource, the <ext-link> element can be used to good effect. The identifier and the resource information are
supplied in the attributes, and the element content is the link display text. For
example:
...
<p>... Trial registration: <ext-link
ext-link-type="clinical trials"
xlink:href="NCT02442440">NCT02442440</ext-link>
(<ext-link ext-link-type="uri"
xlink:href="https://register.clinicaltrials.gov"
>https://register.clinicaltrials.gov</ext-link>)
...</p>
...