title: Media Reporting of Practice-Changing Clinical Trials in Oncology: A North American Perspective.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Media reporting of clinical trials impacts patient-oncologist interactions. We sought to characterize the accuracy of media and Internet reporting of practice-changing clinical trials in oncology.
  
  
  METHODS
  The first media articles referencing 17 practice-changing clinical trials were collected from 4 media outlets: newspapers, cable news, cancer websites, and industry websites. Measured outcomes were media reporting score, social media score, and academic citation score. The media reporting score was a measure of completeness of information detailed in media articles as scored by a 15-point scoring instrument. The social media score represented the ubiquity of social media presence referencing 17 practice-changing clinical trials in cancer as determined by the American Society of Clinical Oncology in its annual report, entitled Clinical Cancer Advances 2012; social media score was calculated from Twitter, Facebook, and Google searches. The academic citation score comprised total citations from Google Scholar plus the Scopus database, which represented the academic impact per clinical cancer advance.
  
  
  RESULTS
  From 170 media articles, 107 (63%) had sufficient data for analysis. Cohen's κ coefficient demonstrated reliability of the media reporting score instrument with a coefficient of determination of 94%. Per the media reporting score, information was most complete from industry, followed by cancer websites, newspapers, and cable news. The most commonly omitted items, in descending order, were study limitations, exclusion criteria, conflict of interest, and other. The social media score was weakly correlated with academic citation score.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Media outlets appear to have set a low bar for coverage of many practice-changing advances in oncology, with reports of scientific breakthroughs often omitting basic study facts and cautions, which may mislead the public. The media should be encouraged to use a standardized reporting template and provide accessible references to original source information whenever feasible.
authors.affiliation: Division of Medical Oncology, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Canada pandrew@toh.on.ca.
authors.forename: Peter
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Andrew
authors.affiliation: Division of Medical Oncology, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Canada.
authors.forename: Michael M
authors.initials: MM
authors.lastname: Vickers
authors.affiliation: City University, London, United Kingdom.
authors.forename: Stephen
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: O'Connor
authors.affiliation: Grand River Regional Cancer Centre, Kitchener, Ontario, Canada.
authors.forename: Mario
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Valdes
authors.affiliation: Department of Medical Oncology, Tom Baker Cancer Centre, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada.
authors.forename: Patricia A
authors.initials: PA
authors.lastname: Tang
mesh_terms: D002986:Clinical Trials as Topic / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D006801:Humans; D008402:Mass Media / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D011642:Publications / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D061108:Social Media / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D014481:United States
keywords: Clinical trials; Journalism; Neoplasms; Social media