Emphasizing the Vital Role of Robust Peer Review: A Series of Publications Highlighting Potential Errors in Results Reporting and a Plea to Editors

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Abstract

PURPOSE: We present a series of publications on lung cancer in several well-recognized medical journals that present potential errors in the analyses and results of survival data. Our work stresses that a publication in a 'peer-reviewed journal' may not guarantee complete fact-checking or accuracy. METHODS: We gathered publications on lung cancer on which we previously established communication with editors via formal letters to the editor and direct communications with them to comments on these works. RESULTS: We present our analysis on survival results of eight publications in different journals. We found that these works did not meet the basic survival analysis principles. First, the progression-free survival (PFS) or overall survival (OS) percentages visually estimated from the curves do not match the number of events described in the figures or text at the median follow-up times of reporting. Secondly, death events are more common than progression events are, resulting in higher PFS than OS curves. These two issues may severely jeopardize the authors' conclusions. Surprisingly, the journal editors communicated via formal letters or direct correspondence and did not find mistakes or did not answer. Our work is beyond consideration as to whether these mistakes were deliberate or came from an honest error of the authors. CONCLUSIONS: We state that journal editors should play a more active role in ensuring the accuracy of publications. Inaccurate data can significantly influence physicians' treatment decisions, potentially leading to ineffective treatments. This underscores the importance of our work and the need for improved accuracy in medical publications, as it directly impacts the professional practice of physicians.

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