Spin in articles about minimally invasive transanal total mesorectal excision: an assessment of the current literature
Bibliographic record
Abstract
AIM: Minimally invasive transanal total mesorectal excision (TaTME) is a new approach for treating rectal cancer. 'Spin' can be defined as 'reporting strategies to highlight that the experimental treatment is beneficial' despite limitations in study design. The aim of this study was to assess spin within publications about TaTME. METHOD: EMBASE and MEDLINE (2009-2017) were searched for publications assessing TaTME in rectal cancer. All papers published between 2009 and 2017 were eligible for inclusion. Study titles and abstracts were assessed for evidence of spin, as previously defined. RESULTS: A total of 1202 studies were identified through our search, and 73 were included. The majority were case series (n = 48, 66%). A total of 55 publications (75%) had evidence of spin within at least one domain. The most common type of spin was claiming safety without describing how this was defined or tested (56%). Other strategies included claiming superiority without support (33%) and reporting nonsignificance as equivalence (42%). We did not find that year of publication (P = 0.61), study design (P = 0.60), number of patients (P = 0.85) or declared conflict of interest (P = 0.43) were associated with spin. CONCLUSION: We have shown that spin is common within studies assessing TaTME for rectal cancer. Despite a lack of support from study results, in the majority of studies authors concluded that TaTME is safe for use in rectal cancer. Readers of study abstracts describing new techniques need to be cautious about accepting the authors' conclusions, especially in case series and observational studies.
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 | 0.055 | 0.217 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.007 | 0.007 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.093 | 0.058 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 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".