The aim of this project is to study large-scale clinical trials, which is an important, yet to the social sciences relatively unknown, scientific and organisational practice. These are performed in a manner that markedly differs from traditional understandings of the laboratory as the site where scientific knowledge is produced. Clinical trials are performed in a distributed organisation made up of several different and coordinated parties. The coordination is not the least indicated by the fact that the results from these endeavours are gathered and reported in a few scientific publications.

Large clinical trials represent substantial financial values to both industry and society. They are costly to run and their results have a significant influence on health care as a basis for evaluating treatments. The project focuses on the large clinical trials' combination of knowledge production and inter-organisational coordination. The research questions are: (1) What are the practices for producing knowledge and inter-organisational coordination that make large clinical practices possible? (2) How do aspects of knowledge production and coordination manifest themselves in these practices? The project can provide important socially relevant contributions as well as theoretical contributions to both research regarding inter-organisational coordination and social studies of science. The project will primarily be performed with a case-study approach relying largely on ethnographic method.