I can scarcely believe it! Our paper, "Seven decades of chemotherapy clinical trials: a pan‑cancer social network analysis" is finally out! https://rdcu.be/b8BOL  @Hem_Onc 1/n

In this paper, we systematically analyzed co-authorship patterns of 29,197 authors of 5,599 publications of prospective clinical trials in oncology over 70+ years! Source: http://HemOnc.org  2/n

Hematology/oncology is a field of subfields, all of which have grown but not at the same pace. For example, the study of multiple myeloma got a big boost coincident with reports of efficacy of thalidomide and bortezomib (#2 in the figure) @rubinstein_md @mtmdphd 3/n

This silo-ing is even more evident when looking at the network of co-authors - most high-impact clinical trialists are extremely focused on one cancer type, with few exceptions e.g., John D. Hainsworth, MD & @BurrisSkip. This pattern has become more pronounced over time... 4/n

However, one interesting finding is that authors who switch focus from one cancer to another enjoy nearly twice the productive period and impact as their peers who stick with one cancer. Here's to career reboots and second chances! https://rdcu.be/b8BOL  @Hem_Onc 5/n

Now for the elephant in the room - gender inequality. Women are under-represented as clinical trial authors; this has improved in recent decades but not as much for 1st/last author roles (including co-1st/co-last, which is rare in the clinical trial space). @HemOncWomenDocs 6/n

The deeper you dig the more concerning this gets. Women have had shorter productive periods and lower overall impact in the field to date (p<<<0.0001 for both comparisons). 7/n

This comparison (page rank vs homophily) is a bit wonky, but it shows that women are less central to the social network of cancer clinical trialists, and tend to have fewer co-authorship collaborations outside their subspecialty. 8/n

Perhaps most jarring are these graphs of gender homophily over time (if you are a woman, how often do you co-author with other women vs men, and vice versa). Men tend to co-author with men, and women tend to co-author with...men. @HemOncWomenDocs #HeForShe 9/n

See those "bookends"? They show that when a cancer clinical trial is published by authors all of one gender, it's always men. And when a single author is the only one of their gender on a paper, it seems to always be a woman (note there are quite a few undetermined, though) 10/n

Wrapping up now. Many more details in the paper: https://rdcu.be/b8BOL . Shout-outs to all my co-authors especially the co-1st authors, who are incidentally all women AND trainees: Xuanyi (Lexi) Li @VUmedicine; @E_Sigworth @vandy_biostat; Adrianne Wu @mtholyoke. 11/n #HeForShe

And finally, shout-out to @Hem_Onc, founder of http://HemOnc.org  - the content of which made this analysis possible. And many thanks to @theNCI #ITCR program, whose funding was a big part of making this multi-year project possible! @jklemm 12/12 fin https://rdcu.be/b8BOL 

Ok I was kidding - one more tweet! If you want to see the paper online instead of directly accessing the PDF, use this link: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-73466-6 -- thanks! Either way it is open access and free to read. 13/12 fin (for real) @Hem_Onc