The phrase "a third of trial" is not correct in standard written English.
It may be intended to refer to a portion of a trial, but it lacks clarity and proper context.
Example: "The jury deliberated for a third of the trial before reaching a verdict."
Alternatives: "one-third of the trial" or "a third of the proceedings."
Almost a third of trials (31%) managed to recruit their original target sample size, whereas a similar proportion (31%) failed to do so.
By contrast, the patients classified less than a third of trials as closer-up (30.95% ± 22.8%) and significantly fewer than the controls (U = 15.5, Z = −2.26, p = 0.024).
This rate is also higher than some other funders, for the National Institutes of Health in the USA, after a median of 51 months after trial completion, a third of trials remained unpublished.
14 We were surprised to see that about a third of trials examined in our study were registered after the completion date; this kind of registration seems inappropriate or irrelevant and is a challenge to the credibility of the registers.
Additional limitations of the evidence included in this review include the short follow-up in a third of trials, potentially not allowing sufficient time to detect improvements in functioning in the intervention group.
The combination arm was discontinued after the initial analysis for lack of efficacy; thus, a third of the trial participants were lost [ 12, 38].
In our review, about a third of the trials were open label trials.
Each of the 3 sequence conditions (predictable, scrambled, and static) composed a third of the trials (randomly intermixed), giving 168 trials per condition for each participant.
A systematic review of worldwide phase 3 trials over 9 years showed that a third of all trials close early due to poor accrual (Schroen et al, 2012).
