Which Dr. Gupta appears most frequently in ClinicalTrials.gov and WHO ICTRP records?
Executive summary
There is no single, authoritative answer in the supplied material to which “Dr. Gupta” appears most frequently across ClinicalTrials.gov and the WHO ICTRP: available sources describe the registries, their scale (ClinicalTrials.gov holds hundreds of thousands of records and the ICTRP aggregates many registries) but do not list counts by investigator name or rank which Dr. Gupta appears most often (available sources do not mention which Dr. Gupta appears most frequently) [1] [2].
1. Why the question matters: names, duplicates and public accountability
Investigators’ names in trial registries matter for transparency, reproducibility and conflict-of-interest checks. ClinicalTrials.gov and WHO’s ICTRP are public tools designed to make trial data and investigator lists available to the public and regulators, and the platforms’ scale—hundreds of thousands of records—means name-frequency questions are plausible and useful to pursue [1] [3]. But raw counts can be distorted by duplicate records, multinational registrations and inconsistent name formatting [4] [2].
2. What the registries actually contain and how they report names
ClinicalTrials.gov is run by the U.S. National Library of Medicine and displays study-level fields including investigators and responsible parties; the site contains hundreds of thousands of trial listings and is the primary public registry for many U.S. and international studies [1] [3]. The WHO ICTRP aggregates records from WHO‑accredited primary registries worldwide and provides a single search portal with downloadable CSV records; ICTRP’s dataset is compiled periodically from those registries [5] [6]. Neither source in the provided results supplies an index of most-common investigator names or an easy “top Dr. Gupta” list [1] [6].
3. Duplicate registrations and name ambiguity distort any simple ranking
Multinational trials are often registered in more than one registry; ICTRP attempts to link related records but duplicate and “hidden” duplicates still complicate counts [4] [2]. Common surnames such as Gupta—shared by many clinicians and scientists across countries—compound the ambiguity: the same surname can represent many distinct persons and the same person may appear with name variants across records. These factors mean a naive count of “Dr. Gupta” strings across datasets would over- or under-estimate real investigator prevalence [2].
4. What the supplied sources show about investigators named Gupta
The search results include individual profiles and mentions of people named Gupta in clinical or academic roles (for example, Amita Gupta at Johns Hopkins), and wider discussion of registry contents and scale [7] [3]. None of the documents provided include an analysis of which specific “Dr. Gupta” appears most frequently across ClinicalTrials.gov or ICTRP records, nor a resolved cross‑registry tally of investigator name frequencies (available sources do not mention which Dr. Gupta appears most frequently) [7] [2].
5. How one would reliably answer the question (method and pitfalls)
A defensible answer requires programmatic analysis of registry data: download ClinicalTrials.gov XML/CSV exports and the ICTRP data extracts, normalize investigator name fields, deduplicate linked trials (using NCT IDs, secondary IDs and ICTRP’s bridged/child flags), and then count unique investigator identities rather than raw name-strings [8] [6] [2]. The major pitfalls to disclose up front are name variants, homonyms, duplicate trial records and multinational multiple-registrations; the ICTRP and published literature document these duplication and linkage issues [4] [2].
6. Alternative viewpoints and limitations in the sources
ClinicalTrials.gov and WHO present themselves as comprehensive, but studies and reviews show data-quality issues (missing fields, inconsistent entries, duplicates) that limit straightforward name-frequency claims; academic work has used deduplication heuristics to correct for these problems [9] [2]. The supplied materials emphasize registry scale and functionality, not investigator-frequency metrics, so any definitive list would require fresh data processing not present in these sources (available sources do not mention a ranked list of Dr. Guptas) [3] [2].
7. Practical next steps if you want a definitive answer
I recommend a reproducible data approach: 1) obtain the latest ClinicalTrials.gov export and the ICTRP CSV, 2) extract investigator/responsible‑party name fields, 3) normalize names and affiliations, 4) collapse duplicate trial records using identifiers and ICTRP “bridged” metadata, and 5) produce counts of distinct investigator identities. The registry documentation and WHO guidance explain data download and linking but do not provide pre-made rankings [8] [6] [4].
Final note: the sources provided document the registries, their scale and known data-quality issues but do not answer who the most‑frequent “Dr. Gupta” is; producing that answer requires the data extraction and deduplication steps above which are not covered in the current reporting (available sources do not mention which Dr. Gupta appears most frequently) [1] [2].