Abstract
It is an honor to be appointed the Editor-in-Chief of Cancer Biotherapy and Radiopharmaceuticals. My thanks go to the outgoing co-Editors-in-Chief, Donald J. Buchsbaum, PhD and Robert K. Oldham, MD.
I look forward to collaborating with authors, the dedicated members of the Journal's editorial board, and researchers nationally and internationally with the goal of making the Journal more impactful. My vision is for us to have an expansion of published papers with an inclusion of a regular review article of current interest and some short technical note format papers which are topical to research tools and techniques of lasting functional value.
We will also have periodic special content issues, the first one in 2018 will be on targeted α-therapy both pre-clinically and clinically. The aim of this special issue is to advance the state of knowledge and expertise across all fields of study that Targeted α-Therapy encompasses be it chemistry, biology, physics or medicine and bring a greater focus on this topic for novices and experts alike
Early in my undergraduate research career many years ago, publishing one's research in a scientific journal was impressed upon me, as an achievement to be celebrated, and most importantly, as a privilege to mark membership in the research community. Even at that time, I looked forward to one day becoming a published author. Once in graduate school, this same intersection of one's research and career advancement through publishing in scientific journals was reinforced yet again. Though I had limited knowledge as to how the process worked, through considerable mentorship, I started to understand how one managed to have the results of their research published. On the surface, it seemed rather simple. I did the research in the lab, generated the data, wrote the experimental, and after providing that to my professor, a draft manuscript would appear on my desk in a matter of days with a note attached to check it over for correctness. Easy days, indeed!
However, therein resides one of the gaps in our training and graduate school processes. While teaching the fine art of writing and assembling a scientific manuscript for submission has undoubtedly improved since my early career, our students still need us to mentor them through the publication process to realize their research and career goals. Further, as a community, we also must teach our students not only about the publishing process, but also how to assemble data, write up their results and prepare manuscripts. As with other important life skills, these activities are often learned best by simply doing. To provide an opportunity for publication of their novel research, one needs a journal such as Cancer Biotherapy and Radiopharmaceuticals.
What are the reasons to publish our research? Isn't it simply to communicate with others and to provide an exchange of information and ideas? Today, as with many actions and activities, this basic rational may have been lost in artificial complexity and metrics that enter into every level of one's research career. The use of publishing as a metric of the quality of research has always existed, yet now it has become an overarching factor in all aspects of research. It may be unduly influencing the decision making processes of funding, research aims, and hence, the careers of researcher's themselves. “One must publish great research in important journals!” has been heralded as both a slogan and a very real metric for career advancement. Let's take a moment to understand if this is really true and valid or merely convenience in action, and whether this convenience, coupled with a desire for rapid publishing, may have a price on the quality and direction of basic research gains.
On the positive side, the accelerated pace of publishing and the competition has fostered and promoted greater access to published literature which leads to more rapid exchange of ideas. Yet on the other hand, the rush to publish mentality is now linked into all career metrics of evaluation and funding. At the same time, this evolution may also result in far too many compromises in maintaining high quality, reproducible research that possesses real value and long-term impact.
That I have termed this evolution as being tainted with “compromises” is a polite term being applied to assembling what used to be described as the minimal publishable unit. But, even the blunt truth here is that too many of these minimal units fall short of even that dubious achievement by making use of every short cut to arrive at the end point.
These concerns are not new, though have recently been raised more broadly within our research community. In the past year, Nature reported on the results of a survey of scientist regarding reproducibility and arrived at an endpoint of a fraction over 50% of the respondents believing that there was a “significant reproducibility crisis.” That may be real or perception, but the concerns speak loudly as to how research is being published. The demands of experimental design along with appropriate characterization of every step and stage have become minimized in pursuit of results that can be speedily published. The inclusion of proper controls, any controls, has also been reduced to the very minimum often times leaving the results with no real context to permit comparative evaluation, and hence, no real value at all. In vitro experiments are reduced to single cell line studies, and animal experimentation is performed at the lowest possible level, both leaving real statistical analysis and again value of the results to be of little real value.
My personal observations over the past decade would support that there are indeed real reproducibility concerns about the scientific literature. And, that may be the real solution or at least the correcting force that has always been a part of research – the ability to question, to be skeptical of the literature regardless of source and era, and to test that knowledge as needed. At some level, that activity of questioning has become frowned upon or downplayed in value, and the rewards eroded.
I will defend the need for detailed experimental procedures that clearly provide all of the information to repeat the studies, that all of the materials are fully and properly characterized so that all can be confident of just what experiments were performed and with what materials, rendering them fully reproducible. Single cell line experiments are self-limiting and multiple cell lines should always be included in experiments. Animal studies are admittedly more difficult as there have been years of their diminishment, yet we have to remain cognizant that in vitro experiments simply are not yet predictive of in vivo results. These experiments are still needed to form a solid basis for clinical translational research. I'll take a similar stance here to state that Cancer, Biotherapy, and Radiopharmaceuticals will be examining all submitted manuscripts to make sure that reproducibility is not in question. The value of controls, their need and use, is a topic that will be on the table in the next issue.