Race and ethnicity reporting rises but remains incomplete in breast surgery journals

Race and ethnicity are central to understanding breast cancer disparities, yet the demographic details needed to interpret outcomes across populations are still missing from a substantial share of clinical research. A new analysis of four high-impact breast surgery journals found that although race and ethnicity reporting improved significantly between 2017 and 2023, fewer than three quarters of studies provided any such data by the end of the period, and specific groups, including Hispanic and Asian-American patients, remained underrepresented.

The study, published in Breast Cancer Research and Treatment, was led by Omar Font-Torres and Tammy Ju together with colleagues at other institutions. The team queried PubMed for breast surgery related clinical research articles published between January 2017 and June 2023, focusing on the four breast-focused journals with the highest impact factors: Annals of Surgical Oncology, Breast Cancer Research and Treatment, Clinical Breast Cancer, and The Breast Journal. In total, 288 studies met the criteria for analysis.

To track change over time, the researchers divided the included articles into three publication windows: 2017 to 2018 with 108 studies, 2019 to 2020 with 87 studies, and 2021 to 2023 with 93 studies. They then assessed how often each study reported racial and ethnic categories, using chi-square tests, Fisher’s exact tests, and the Cochran-Armitage trend test to evaluate whether reporting practices shifted across the periods.

Overall, 181 of the 288 studies, or 62.9 percent, reported any race or ethnicity information. That aggregate figure, however, concealed a clear upward trajectory. Reporting of any race or ethnicity rose from 53.7 percent of studies in 2017 to 2018, to 63.2 percent in 2019 to 2020, and to 73.1 percent in 2021 to 2023, a statistically significant increase with a p-value below 0.01.

The authors emphasized that even this improved figure means more than a quarter of recent clinical breast surgery studies still omit racial and ethnic data entirely. Reporting in 2021 to 2023 had only reached 73.1 percent, leaving a persistent gap in a field where breast cancer incidence, subtype distribution, treatment access, and mortality differ substantially across racial and ethnic groups.

When the researchers examined individual categories, some patterns stood out. White race was reported almost universally, appearing in 100 percent, 96.4 percent, and 100.0 percent of studies across the three periods, though this variation was not statistically significant (p = 0.09). Black race was reported in 79.3 percent, 76.4 percent, and 88.2 percent of studies across the periods (p = 0.20), and Asian race in 50.0 percent, 45.5 percent, and 60.3 percent (p = 0.24). None of these individual category trends reached statistical significance.

Hispanic ethnicity and a pooled “Other” race category showed similar stability without significant change. Hispanic ethnicity appeared in 46.6 percent, 47.3 percent, and 48.5 percent of studies across the three periods (p = 0.97), while the “Other” category was reported in 55.2 percent, 61.8 percent, and 66.2 percent (p = 0.45). The consistently lower figures for Hispanic ethnicity and Asian race indicate that these populations are documented less often than White or Black patients in this body of research, limiting the ability of individual studies to describe outcomes for them.

The analysis has limitations inherent to its design. It examined only the four highest-impact breast-focused journals over a defined six-and-a-half-year window, so the findings may not extend to lower-tier journals or to broader oncology literature. The study assessed whether demographic variables were reported, not whether they were accurately collected or analyzed, and it could not determine why authors omitted the data.

Nevertheless, the results provide a quantitative benchmark for a long-standing concern in health disparities research. The significant rise in overall reporting indicates growing attention to demographic transparency in breast surgery studies, but the plateau below complete reporting and the underrepresentation of Hispanic and Asian-American populations show that reporting practices remain limited.

The authors conclude that race reporting in high-impact breast surgery journals, while increasing from 2017 to 2023, remains limited, and they call for more consistent and comprehensive research standards. For researchers seeking to close breast cancer outcome gaps, the message is that disparities research depends on basic demographic data that a meaningful fraction of studies in the field’s leading journals still does not report.

Subject of Research: Trends in race and ethnicity demographic reporting in clinical breast surgery research journals

Article Title: Recent trends in race and ethnicity reporting in breast surgery journals

Article References: Font-Torres, O., Khedr, S., Ende, V., Hong, J., Ma, X., Abramov, D., Raidah, A., Zhang, J., Colback, A., Debi, J., Malik, M., Bea, V., Newman, L., Heffernan, D. S., Chao, S., & Ju, T. (2026). Recent trends in race and ethnicity reporting in breast surgery journals. Breast Cancer Research and Treatment, 220(1), Article 13. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10549-026-08110-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10549-026-08110-4

Keywords: breast surgery, race reporting, ethnicity, health disparities, breast cancer, journal publishing, demographics, PubMed, Hispanic underrepresentation, research standards, Recent, trends