There are a number of useful guideline repositories that provide search interfaces that make identifying available practice guidelines easier. Two noteworthy examples are the AHRQ’s National Guideline Clearinghouse (NGC) and the Guidelines International Network (G-I-N).

NGC “is a public resource for summaries of evidence-based clinical practice guidelines”. Their “New This Week” link provides a summary of the latest additions to their database (and can be subscribed to via email or RSS feed).  NGC does include guidelines from other countries but the database is limited to guidelines that meet certain criteria for inclusion.

Another option for guidelines from countries across the globe is the Guidelines International Network (G-I-N), which has the World’s largest international guideline library. ”The Guidelines International network, G-I-N, is a global network, founded in 2002. It has grown to comprise 105 organisations and 149 individual members representing 53 countries from all continents (March 2018).”

Although they are valuable search tools, the problem with both of these options, however, is that there is always a lag period between the date that a guideline is published and when it actually becomes available in NGC or G-I-N.

For identifying more recent guidelines, a better option may be to search a database like PubMed. PubMed even has search filters that can be applied to results in order to limit these to the publication types: Practice Guideline[ptyp] OR Guideline[ptyp]

However, limiting by MeSH indexing terms will only bring up the records that have been fully processed for the MEDLINE portion of PubMed, which are likely not the most recent additions to PubMed, as adding index terms to records may take 2-4 weeks. As such, simply keyword searching for a known guideline developer may be the best approach for identifying the most current guideline-related publications in PubMed.

For example, searching on the phrase “American Society of Clinical Oncology Clinical Practice Guideline” or “ASCO Clinical Practice Guideline Summary” in the PubMed search box will bring up the latest ASCO guidelines (or at least the majority of them), such as this one from April 2018 that includes a lead author from MSK:

Morris MJ, Rumble RB, Basch E, Hotte SJ, Loblaw A, Rathkopf D, Celano P, Bangs R, Milowsky MI. Optimizing Anticancer Therapy in Metastatic Non-Castrate Prostate Cancer: American Society of Clinical Oncology Clinical Practice Guideline. J Clin Oncol. 2018 Apr 2:JCO2018780619. doi: 10.1200/JCO.2018.78.0619. [Epub ahead of print] PubMed PMID: 29608397.

For more tips on searching for published guidelines, feel free to Ask Us!