The silent minority - unpublished data on cancer care - Impact Factor - Isseus 46 - Articles - Cancer World

The silent minority - unpublished data on cancer care

From 1989 to 2003, 709 phase III trials evaluating systemic cancer treatment were presented at ASCO meetings. Tam and collaborators have now reported that 9% of these trials were never published, and 13% were published after a five-year delay. More than half of these studies would have had clinical impact if published promptly.

» Daniel F. Hayes

Two key elements of the scientific method are methodology transparency and reproducibility of results by others. Traditionally, these elements have been facilitated by the well-entrenched system of peer-review publication. This concept has had almost universal acceptance among the scientific community, although in the past few years there have been calls for open publication of all scientific results without the peer-review process. Some experts have advocated the creation of a type of ‘free-for-all’ post-publication peer review, with the view that classic, pre-publication peer review is usually selective (based on whom the editor knows and on who actually agrees to referee the article) and arbitrary (based on the respective biases of the reviewers).[1]........