Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Clinical trial management system

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was keep. J04n(talk page) 12:21, 13 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Clinical trial management system

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Previous references were primary sources, no citations in body, seemingly only pertinent to another AfD nomination, Forte Research Systems. Spam-magnet. UseTheCommandLine (talk) 12:19, 5 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Keep - CTMS is a specific field of Content Management, something like CMS solutions but peculiar to the Clinical Research phases. It's worth keeping in Wikipedia. Toffanin (talk) 14:27, 5 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

my feeling, in perusing the literature (mainly pubmed, though perhaps there are better sources?) was that even though this type of software had its own name, it was not particularly distinct from other business management software, and did not have enough references specific to CTMS systems to garner a page of its own. Should we have a separate article for each industry that uses customized software? -- UseTheCommandLine (talk) 15:24, 5 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Keep - Seems like a poor-quality article, so I will try to add stuff in the coming days/weeks. Disclaimer: I did CTMS work for 9 years, so I will know a little bit whereof I speak. I will endeavor to make the article good and avoid the usual traps. So, please grant me a stay of execution and see if this can be redeemed. elpincha (talk) 20:08, 6 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Response this still doesn't get at the core issue of WP:Notability. As I said, coming from a medical background, it isn't apparent to me from the literature that because there is a term for the type of software used in the clinical trials sector, it is somehow substantially different than other custom business software. if your contention is that CTMS is inherently notable, what types of literature are you looking at that give you that impression? I think we can safely say that it isn't the medical literature. -- UseTheCommandLine (talk) 21:40, 6 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

To your point here: medical literature would be (by and large) unconcerned with the outcomes expected of a CTMS. Trial management engages physicians in their capacities as investigators, EC/IRB members, bureaucrats, and/or medical monitors. Exceptions to this would be CTMS implementations that touch upon drug dynamics, biologics, etc. which are the minority.

Circling back to my original intent: if we could assume there is a good, comprehensive article (or section) on the management of clinical trials, including the management of feasibility studies, documentation approval, monitoring, subject progress, protocol deviations, etc., one could say we don't really need a separate article on CTMS, which would be just "the software that does that". Maybe we could try that route and make (almost) everybody happy. elpincha (talk) 22:03, 6 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Additional comment from submitter -- for the record, i would support a total rewrite and a merge with another article on, say, management software (which article would be most appropriate?). As it stands, though, I am quite skeptical of the need for it to be its own article. -- UseTheCommandLine (talk) 21:47, 6 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Management-related deletion discussions. ★☆ DUCKISPEANUTBUTTER☆★ 07:28, 6 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Software-related deletion discussions. ★☆ DUCKISPEANUTBUTTER☆★ 07:28, 6 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Medicine-related deletion discussions. ★☆ DUCKISPEANUTBUTTER☆★ 07:28, 6 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Keep Especially in the US, clinical trials are a specialized world unto themselves; the FDA is a rigorous taskmaster. The associated management software can be fairly specialized. Sources I found:

"Usability comparison of three clinical trial management systems", AMIA Annu Symp Proc. 2005; 2005: 921
"Towards Semantic Interoperability in a Clinical Trials Management System", Lecture Notes in Computer Science Volume 4273, 2006, pp 901-912
"On selecting a clinical trial management system for large scale, multi-centre, multi-modal clinical research study.", Studies in Health Technology and Informatics 2011, 168:89-95
"A web-based clinical trial management system for a sham-controlled multicenter clinical trial in depression", Clin Trials April 2010 vol. 7 no. 2 174-182
Three pages in the book Siebel Clinical Blackbook
"Ontology Based Data Management Systems for Post-Genomic Clinical Trials within a European Grid Infrastructure for Cancer Research" in Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, 2007. EMBS 2007. 29th Annual International Conference of the IEEE, pp. 6434 - 6437

Except for the Siebel book, these are all peer-reviewed articles in which CTMS is discussed in depth. Peer reviewed articles are generally considered reliable sources, so we have multiple RS that seem to indicated notability of the topic according to general notability guidelines (WP:GNG). The article needs some work to establish sources and to convert to a more encyclopedic style. But these are surmountable problems (see WP:SURMOUNTABLE for details). The notability of the topic and the surmountable problems of the article suggest that this article should be kept. --Mark viking (talk) 22:31, 6 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.