About
What this is
A reference for the trials that underpin respiratory practice — what each one asked, who it enrolled, and what it actually found. It exists to answer "which trial was that, and what did it show?" in about ten seconds.
Who makes it
RespiratoryTrials.org is built and maintained by Dr Carl Reynolds, a respiratory physician. The whole site is generated from plain text files kept in a public GitHub repository: the trial records, the topic narratives, the build script and the checks that gate it are all there to read. Nothing on the page is produced by a process you cannot inspect.
That openness is the point rather than a convenience. A reference like this asks you to trust a one-line summary of a trial you may not have read, so the least it can do is show its working — where each trial came from, which PubMed record it rests on, and what was changed and when.
Corrections are genuinely wanted. If a record misstates a result, omits a harm, or draws a conclusion the paper does not support, please open an issue or send a pull request. Every record is one small file, so a correction is a few lines rather than a database migration. The site has already been through a systematic review that found and fixed real errors, including four trials named after the wrong paper; assume there are more.
With thanks to James
This site is a straight homage to cardiologytrials.org, built by Dr James P Howard. His site has been quietly making cardiologists better at evidence-based medicine for over a decade, and respiratory medicine has never had an equivalent. The structure here — topic, therapy group, therapy, trial, with a narrative summary per topic — is his idea. Thank you, James.
Where the trial list comes from
Trial selection follows the ATS Adult Reading List, an expert-curated teaching list maintained by the American Thoracic Society's Professional Development Committee. The 2026 edition is credited to Kummer, Sury, Hoisington and Kempainen, with earlier editions by Thornton, Kummer and Kempainen.
The list is used here as a guide to which papers matter and their PubMed identifiers. The ATS authors' own annotations are their work and are not reproduced — every summary on this site is written independently. Where our editorial judgment says a trial belongs and the reading list does not include it, we add it and mark it as such.
A second selection source is WikiJournalClub's list of landmark pulmonology papers, a community-maintained wiki. It is an older list, organised by training grade and weighted towards foundational papers, which makes it a good complement to the ATS list rather than a duplicate of it. It is used the same way: for which trials matter and their citations, with every summary written here independently. Its entries that are diagnostic criteria or clinical decision rules rather than trials — Light's criteria, the Wells score, PIOPED — are deliberately not included, because this is a trials site.
Two other sites shaped how records are presented: Landmark Trials, for the idea of recording the numeric result and a note on how a trial has aged, and Critical Care Reviews, for grouping trials by the clinical question they answer rather than by drug.
Every record names its provenance. Most come from the ATS reading list; a smaller number are marked as coming from WikiJournalClub, and the rest are editorial additions where our judgment said a trial belonged and neither list included it.
How the facts are kept honest
Every citation on this site — title, journal, date, authors — is fetched from PubMed and rendered from that cached record. None of it is typed by hand, so a citation cannot drift. There are currently 504 verified citations behind 309 trial records.
Each trial's numeric result and the quoted conclusion are taken from the published abstract. The one-line verdict and the "how it has aged" note are editorial, and are the parts most worth arguing with. A record that has not been checked against its source carries a warning at the top of the page. Studies on the reading list that do not yet have a full record are listed on their topic page rather than left out, so the gaps are visible.
Reading the effect column
The small mark beside each trial is a miniature forest plot. The vertical rule is the line of no effect; the square is the result on the primary endpoint. It reads left for benefit, centre for no significant difference, right for harm. Direction is shown by position rather than colour so it works in greyscale and with colour vision deficiency. It is a summary, not a substitute for the confidence interval in the paper.
Corrections
If something here is wrong, it should be fixed. The whole site is generated from plain text files, so a correction is a small edit rather than a database migration.
Nothing here is clinical advice. These are teaching summaries of published trials; treatment decisions need the paper, the guideline, and the patient in front of you.