Quality and consistency of phase III clinical trial abstracts presented at an Annual Meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology compared with their subsequent full-text publications
Bibliographic record
Abstract
6537 Background: Practice guidelines and evidence summaries in oncology are developed by experts to assist providers in making appropriate decisions regarding management. These documents result from a systematic review of literature from medical journals and meeting proceedings. Because there is often less rigorous peer reviewing of abstracts published in these proceedings compared to journal publications, the quality of evidence provided by these abstracts is uncertain. Methods: We identified abstracts describing phase III clinical trials of chemotherapy, chemoradiotherapy, immune therapy and hormone therapy presented at the 36th ASCO Annual Meeting in May 2000. We searched Medline and Pubmed for all corresponding publications. Data was extracted from the abstracts and publications meeting our inclusion criteria. Results: A total of 192 abstracts were identified. Seventy-four abstracts met our inclusion criteria. Six years after the 2000 ASCO Annual Meeting, 74% of these abstracts had corresponding publications. 39% of the abstracts explicitly indicated that they were reporting interim results. The primary endpoint was stated in 34% of the abstracts and 100% of the published papers. The primary outcome result differed by greater than five percent between the abstract and publication in 25% of the abstracts. The statistical significance of the primary outcome changed in 7% of the abstracts with publications. The final conclusion was consistent between the abstract and publication for 92% of the abstracts with reported conclusions. Conclusions: ASCO annual meeting abstracts of phase III trials appear to consistently reflect final published results and can likely be used in practice guidelines. However, occasional discrepancies underline the need for caution in completely adopting these results prior to full publication. No significant financial relationships to disclose.
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 | 0.452 | 0.843 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.009 | 0.014 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.053 | 0.050 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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; the direct Gemma label and the distilled Codex classifier agree on what is shown here.
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".