A couple months back, my wife – a physician – was reading a press release from Anixa Biosciences on prophylactic breast cancer vaccine:
And there’s mention of a clinical trial; so she went to search ClinicalTrials.gov:
The same search on Clincosm yields:
The reason you can’t find it on ClinicalTrials.gov is because their search is only looking at some fields… not all of the fields. And so when you input keywords, they’re only checking if some fields have your keywords.
This type of search was very common before Google came on the scene. You had to input the right keywords into the right fields and if you got it right, you’d happily get on with it.
Full-text search engines – as is in the name – searches all of the text. Google was the first to do this at scale and being able to find stuff on Google was magical back in the early 2000’s.
That’s not fair, you say. There’s Advanced Search where you can explicitly specify which fields to search on.
No cigar. You can’t find this study under Anixa Biosciences because Anixa is not listed as the sponsor. Dr. George T. Budd – the Clinical Investigator conducting the trial – is listed as the sponsor.
This is 2021. There’s no reason to be held back by the tool that is incapable of full-text search.