Surgical therapy, which accurate staging and pathological diagnosis relay on, is still irreplaceable in the treatment strategy of lung cancer, especially for the early stage nonsmall-cell lung cancer (NSCLC) (1). Besides resection of tumors, many prognostic factors, including nodal status, histology, and tumor size, can be provided through surgical procedure. Nodal status, as one of the most important factors in the staging definition and adjuvant chemotherapy selection, has always been playing a significant role in the heath care of lung cancer patients (2). However, differing from gastrointestinal and breast cancer, the recommendation of lymph node (LN) dissection or examinations from NCCN is in the qualitative level and the studies focus on the examined lymph nodes (ELNs) is still insufficient in lung cancer (1,3,4). Thus, Liang et al. investigated the effect of ELNs in the staging and prognosis of NSCLC in a real-world retrospective analysis, which tried to provide a reliable evidence of LN management in the quantitative level for NSCLC patients (5).The investigation was performed according to Chinese registry and the SEER database, which were from multicenter and real-world data sets. The tremendous number of cases made this study more reliable. The authors chose the patients from stage I to IIIA, which aimed to emphasize the LN in the staging and treatment strategy selection. The patients of advanced local lung cancer such as IIIB were excluded since the radical resection was not the standard care for these patients. They also excluded the patients of SCLC as this more aggressive histology may not be suitable for surgical treatment and therefore underrate the importance of LN in the prognosis prediction and treatment selection (6). The results were encouraging in that ELNs counts were strongly associated with the positive LNs in any N stage after the adjustment with other factors. The number of ELNs and overall survival (OS) were positively correlated in N0 stage and the cut off of 16 for ELNs counts were founded and confirmed according to this article. The result indicated that the pursuit of maximal LN resection may provide a better long-term survival in NSCLC patients and the count of 16 ELNs might be considered as a minimal number.Two sets of database recruited different racial people worldwide. Asian patients may present different genetic and histological characteristics in contrast with Caucasians, but there was no significant difference on the relation of ELNs count and staging migrations and OS between both races (7). Different types of histology may present diverse clinical features, treatment strategy and long-term survival results. Therefore, the authors examined the difference of histological subgroups via stratification analysis, which tried to find out the more details of the correlation between ELNs and OS. The result demonstrated that there were no Editorial