Blog Buzz: January 22 – January 28

Posted on by

Links from around the life science, oncology, and medical library blogsophere:

  • Nature Publishing Group released a dedicated app for the iPad. Unfortunately, it is for personal subscribers only and does not allow users to access institutional subscriptions. If you want to read NPG publications on the iPad, search for “Nature” in the eresources search box on the MSKCC Library web site (login if you are off campus), click on the link to the journal title, and you will have access to the journal’s full text. The regular Nature website is very usable in an iPad browser.
  • Facultyof1000 blog Naturally Selected posted an informative five minute video of Dr. Peter Murray-Rust speaking about open data. For more on the topic, check out the Twitter hashtag #beyondthePDF.
  • MSKCC led research that has resulted in a life-prolonging melanoma drug was blogged about at BioSingularity.
  • The Wall Street Journal Health Blog reported on ASCO’s new policy statement on doctor-patient communication about end-of-life care for cancer patients.
  • The NCI has launched a new project called Provocative Questions, “intended to assemble a list of important but non-obvious questions that will stimulate the NCI’s research communities to use laboratory, clinical, and population sciences in especially effective and imaginative ways.”
  • The Scholarly Kitchen posted an essay (and cool video): The Rise of China: Data Shows How Science Follows Economic Growth.
  • A Johns Hopkins research team published their “citation amnesia” paper, in which they found that many biomedical papers fail to cite previously published related work. “Especially disturbing: Of 1,101 RCTs having at least five prior trials available to cite, 23 percent referred to none of them and another 23 percent cited only one.” My two cents: I strongly suspect that if they looked closely at the literature searching process of the “amnesiac” investigators, they would find poor literature searching skills and habits to blame as much as the alleged bias for the lack of citations. If your institution has a medical or science librarian, utilize him/her! That’s what we do! PubGet link to Annals article.
  • CancerNetwork.com posted an article that summarized a recent Cancer Journal article analyzing the potential benefits and drawbacks of the recently passed healthcare bill on cancer research.