MEDSHRID: Clinical Research Study Identifier from NLM

MEDSHRID stands for MEDical Subject Heading Research Identifier. It is a unique integer assigned by the National Library of Medicine (NLM) at the NIH to identify clinical research studies within the clinical research enterprise.

Purpose

• Provides a structured, persistent identifier for study tracking.
• Facilitates interoperability across registries, repositories, and analysis platforms.
• Links to MeSH terms for standardized subject indexing.

Usage

Researchers, sponsors, and data managers use MEDSHRID to deduplicate records, link publications to protocols, and enable federated queries across clinical trial databases.