Clinical trial map

Site

One trial_locations row: a facility entered by the registrant for a study. A study listing 40 US facilities contributes 40 sites to the United States. Locations with an empty country are excluded.

Trial

A distinct study with at least one site in the country. A multinational study counts once per country, so the trials column summed over countries exceeds the number of distinct studies; the page headline "Trials" is the distinct count over the whole scope, computed live.

Recruiting

The location's own status is RECRUITING; when the registrant gave no location status (about 82 % of rows) the study's overall status RECRUITING is used instead. "All statuses" includes completed and withdrawn studies.

Study type

Interventional and observational studies are both included; there is no study_type filter.

Country name

The registrant's spelling as exported by ClinicalTrials.gov, kept verbatim so the "View trials" link filters the list exactly; ISO 3166-1 alpha-3 is added for drawing.

One row per (cancer, phase, recruiting_only, country). Cancer: all oncology trials, or one of the active top-level cancers; a trial belongs to a top-level cancer when any of its mapped conditions is the cancer or one of its descendants in the NCIt hierarchy (recursive traversal, depth ≤ 12 — the same traversal as the entity counters). A study mapped to several top-level cancers counts in each; the all-trials scope counts it once. Phase: any, or Phase 1–4; a PHASE2|PHASE3 study counts under both, EARLY_PHASE1 counts under Phase 1, studies with phase N/A count only under "any". Recruiting: as defined above.

Counts: sites = count(*), trials = count(DISTINCT trial_id). Rebuilt in one transaction by pnpm cix intel (≈ 11 800 rows, 178 country names, about 30 s). The freshness line shows the rebuild time.

Current short names and legacy long forms ("Korea, Republic of", "Russian Federation", "Viet Nam", "Réunion", "Palestinian Territory, occupied") are mapped to alpha-3, case-, whitespace- and apostrophe-insensitively. Territories keep their own code (Puerto Rico PRI, Hong Kong HKG, Réunion REU, Guam GUM…) because that is how the registrant counted the site; Kosovo uses the user-assigned XKX; "Virgin Islands" is read as the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Names without a current ISO code stay unmapped, appear in the table by name and are never painted: “Serbia and Montenegro”, “Former Serbia and Montenegro”, “Federal Republic of Yugoslavia”, “Former Yugoslavia”, “Yugoslavia”, “Netherlands Antilles”, “Czechoslovakia”, “Union of Soviet Socialist Republics”, “USSR”. A unit test checks that every distinct country name in the database either resolves or is on this explicit list, so a new spelling cannot silently vanish from the map.

• Geometry: Natural Earth 1:110m (world-atlas, public domain); numeric ISO ids converted to alpha-3; Antarctica dropped; Northern Cyprus and Somaliland have no code and render as "no site".
• Projection: Equal Earth (d3-geo), fitted to the sphere in a 960×480 viewBox — equal-area, so high-latitude countries are not visually inflated.
• Class breaks: quantiles (equal number of countries per class), at most 5 classes, computed on the displayed metric over countries with ≥ 1 site for the current filter. Site counts are extremely skewed (the United States hosts about half of all sites; the median country has a few dozen): equal intervals would put every country but one in the first class and a logarithmic scale would hide the difference between 1 and 30 sites. Thresholds are the observed class maxima, so the legend shows the exact range and country count of each class. Colours are comparable within one view only.
• Colour: sequential teal ramp #e2eeee #b5d3d4 #7fb1b3 #3f8286 #0b4a4d; "no site" is the paper-3 tone. Colour is never the only carrier: each country is a link with a text title, the legend is textual and the full table is always rendered.
• City layer: only when a cancer is selected — live aggregate of locations by (country, city, state) with the mean geocoded position, top 300 by sites, dot area ∝ sites. The registry-wide, all-status city aggregate (≈ 3 s) is not served per request.

• Sites reflect registration practice, not research capacity: US sponsors list every facility, other sponsors often list one coordinating site per country; only ClinicalTrials.gov is ingested.
• Location status is missing for ~82 % of rows; falling back to the study status over-counts recruiting sites at facilities that have closed.
• Basket trials mapped to several top-level cancers count in each cancer scope.
• Coordinates come from the upstream registry; cities without coordinates are absent from the dot layer only.
• Counts are not normalised by population or burden; such views belong to the rankings layer with their own formula version.

Reference text: docs/methodology/trial-map.md. General methodology: How the index is built.