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

We gathered eight publications on lung cancer in different journals on which we previously established communication with editors via formal letters to the editor and direct communications with them to comment on these works. We found that these works needed to 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 were more common than progression events, 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.