Cancer Clinical Trials: The Emergence and Development of a New Style of Practice
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Clinical trials are the principal vector for the development of chemotherapy, and they have become such a pervasive element of clinical cancer research that modern oncologists tend to take them for granted. Yet the system of cancer clinical trials amounts to a relatively recent (post-World War II) innovation. Its development has proceeded through ad hoc adjustments, and has produced a self-vindicating, yet open-ended, style of practice. This paper examines the historical development and articulation of the components of this new style of practice (protocols, oncologists, statistics, patients, and diseases), and of the new kind of objectivity they engender, by drawing on selected examples from American and European cancer clinical trial systems.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.105 | 0.081 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.126 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.023 | 0.020 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.008 | 0.017 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".