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Data

Number of clinical trials by purpose

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Medicine & Biotechnology

What you should know about this indicator

  • This data comes from the database. It only includes that are marked as "completed" and have a valid "completion date".
  • The purpose of a clinical trial refers to the main objective or goal of the study, such as testing a new treatment, comparing treatments, or understanding a disease.
  • Possible purposes include testing a new treatment (drug or device), improving diagnostics, preventing disease, or understanding a disease.
  • Registration in the ClinicalTrials.gov database is mandatory for trials in the United States and for treatments that seek FDA approval, but voluntary for other trials conducted in other countries.

How is this data described by its producer?

The main objective of the intervention(s) being evaluated by the clinical trial.

  • Treatment: One or more interventions are being evaluated for treating a disease, syndrome, or condition.
  • Prevention: One or more interventions are being assessed for preventing the development of a specific disease or health condition.
  • Diagnostic: One or more interventions are being evaluated for identifying a disease or health condition.
  • Supportive Care: One or more interventions are evaluated for maximizing comfort, minimizing side effects, or mitigating against a decline in the participant's health or function.
  • Screening: One or more interventions are assessed or examined for identifying a condition, or risk factors for a condition, in people who are not yet known to have the condition or risk factor.
  • Health Services Research: One or more interventions for evaluating the delivery, processes, management, organization, or financing of healthcare.
  • Basic Science: One or more interventions for examining the basic mechanism of action (for example, physiology or biomechanics of an intervention).
  • Device Feasibility: An intervention of a device product is being evaluated in a small clinical trial (generally fewer than 10 participants) to determine the feasibility of the product; or a clinical trial to test a prototype device for feasibility and not health outcomes. Such studies are conducted to confirm the design and operating specifications of a device before beginning a full clinical trial.
  • Other: None of the other options applies.
Number of clinical trials by purpose
Annual number of completed clinical trials registered globally in the database, by purpose. The purpose of a clinical trial refers to the main objective or goal of the study, such as testing a new treatment, comparing treatments, or understanding a disease. This includes only .
Source
ClinicalTrials.gov (2025) – with major processing by Our World in Data
Last updated
July 28, 2025
Next expected update
July 2026
Date range
1918–2025
Unit
trials

Sources and processing

This data is based on the following sources

ClinicalTrials.gov – Clinical Trials (ClinicalTrials.gov)

ClinicalTrials.gov is a website and online database of clinical research studies and information about their results. The purpose of ClinicalTrials.gov is to provide information about clinical research studies to the public, researchers, and health care professionals.

Retrieved on
July 28, 2025
Retrieved from
https://clinicaltrials.gov/about-site/trends-charts
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
National Library of Medicine (US), National Center for Biotechnology Information, ClinicalTrials.gov. U.S. National Institutes of Health, https://clinicaltrials.gov/ (2025)

ClinicalTrials.gov is a website and online database of clinical research studies and information about their results. The purpose of ClinicalTrials.gov is to provide information about clinical research studies to the public, researchers, and health care professionals.

Retrieved on
July 28, 2025
Retrieved from
https://clinicaltrials.gov/about-site/trends-charts
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
National Library of Medicine (US), National Center for Biotechnology Information, ClinicalTrials.gov. U.S. National Institutes of Health, https://clinicaltrials.gov/ (2025)

How we process data at Our World in Data

All data and visualizations on Our World in Data rely on data sourced from one or several original data providers. Preparing this original data involves several processing steps. Depending on the data, this can include standardizing country names and world region definitions, converting units, calculating derived indicators such as per capita measures, as well as adding or adapting metadata such as the name or the description given to an indicator.

At the link below you can find a detailed description of the structure of our data pipeline, including links to all the code used to prepare data across Our World in Data.

Read about our data pipeline
Notes on our processing step for this indicator
  • This data comes from the database. It only includes that are marked as "completed" and have a valid "completion date".

Reuse this work

  • All data produced by third-party providers and made available by Our World in Data are subject to the license terms from the original providers. Our work would not be possible without the data providers we rely on, so we ask you to always cite them appropriately (see below). This is crucial to allow data providers to continue doing their work, enhancing, maintaining and updating valuable data.
  • All data, visualizations, and code produced by Our World in Data are completely open access under the Creative Commons BY license. You have the permission to use, distribute, and reproduce these in any medium, provided the source and authors are credited.

Citations

How to cite this page

To cite this page overall, including any descriptions, FAQs or explanations of the data authored by Our World in Data, please use the following citation:

“Data Page: Number of clinical trials by purpose”, part of the following publication: Tuna Acisu, Saloni Dattani, Fiona Spooner, Veronika Samborska, Hannah Ritchie, and Max Roser (2025) - “Medicine and Biotechnology”. Data adapted from ClinicalTrials.gov. Retrieved from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260304-094028/grapher/number-of-clinical-trials-by-purpose.html [online resource] (archived on March 4, 2026).

How to cite this data

In-line citationIf you have limited space (e.g. in data visualizations), you can use this abbreviated in-line citation:

ClinicalTrials.gov (2025) – with major processing by Our World in Data

Full citation

ClinicalTrials.gov (2025) – with major processing by Our World in Data. “Number of clinical trials by purpose” [dataset]. ClinicalTrials.gov, “Clinical Trials (ClinicalTrials.gov)” [original data]. Retrieved April 6, 2026 from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260304-094028/grapher/number-of-clinical-trials-by-purpose.html (archived on March 4, 2026).

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https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-clinical-trials-by-purpose.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false
Metadata URL (JSON format)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-clinical-trials-by-purpose.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false

Code examples

Examples of how to load this data into different data analysis tools.

Excel / Google Sheets
=IMPORTDATA("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-clinical-trials-by-purpose.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")
Python with Pandas
import pandas as pd
import requests

# Fetch the data.
df = pd.read_csv("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-clinical-trials-by-purpose.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false", storage_options = {'User-Agent': 'Our World In Data data fetch/1.0'})

# Fetch the metadata
metadata = requests.get("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-clinical-trials-by-purpose.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false").json()
R
library(jsonlite)

# Fetch the data
df <- read.csv("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-clinical-trials-by-purpose.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")

# Fetch the metadata
metadata <- fromJSON("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-clinical-trials-by-purpose.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")
Stata
import delimited "https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-clinical-trials-by-purpose.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false", encoding("utf-8") clear