CXCL5 and pancreatic neoplasm: As illustrated in Fig. 4 and Table 1, of the 14 genes identified, 12 genes (e.g., ANXA1, LPAR3, SSTR1, CXCL5, KISS1R) have been reported to be involved in pancreatic cancer pathogenesis or significant in predicting overall survival, indicating that the big data-based analyses in the current work using TCGA training cohort and ICGC validation cohort have prognostic values.