In cancer science, many discoveries don't hold up | Reuters

In cancer science, many discoveries don't hold up | Reuters

The silent minority - unpublished data on cancer care - Impact Factor - Isseus 46 - Articles - Cancer World

The silent minority - unpublished data on cancer care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]........

Eighth retraction marks slide of lung cancer work (+breast cancer) | Reuters

"...."To a certain extent, what I'm worried about is that this may show aspects of how it is becoming increasingly difficult to check the scientific literature and how that difficulty stems at least in part from lack of immediate access to data but also lack of code and documentation," Baggerly told Reuters Health.
Given the highly technical nature of the work, it's not surprising that the flaws in the papers weren't caught before they were published, according to Baggerly.
"That's actually OK," he said. "It's not OK that it took so long for the challenges to be accepted once the research was questioned."
"The other thing that is not OK is the fact that it made it into guiding clinical trials," Baggerly added.
Brawley said the story "is a tragedy in a number of different ways.".....

Incidentally… avoiding the problem of incidental findings (Practical Ethics)

"A new study from the Mayo clinic in the United States points to a frequent           problem in certain types of medical research. When healthy volunteers or patients with a given condition take part in research studies they may have brain scans, CAT scans, blood tests or genetic tests that they wouldn’t otherwise have had. These tests are not done for the benefit of the individual, they are designed to answer a research question. But sometimes, quite often according to the authors of this new study, researchers may spot something on the scan that shouldn’t be there, and that could indicate a previously undiagnosed health condition. These ‘incidental findings’ generate an ethical dilemma for researchers....."cont'd