Three Questions for our Librarians – Dina

This month I asked three questions to Dina Matsoukas, Research Informationist.

What areas can you help MSK users with?
As a Research Informationist, I can help MSK users with their research by conducting literature searches and providing citation management training and support. As a member of the MSK Library’s Systematic Review Service, I participate in and provide guidance on systematic review and evidence-based practice projects conducted at MSK. I also provide scholarly research/communication support, for example, by helping authors understand quality metrics when evaluating journals to submit their manuscripts to for publication or when documenting and assessing their own record of scholarly productivity.

What projects have you been working on recently?
Over the summer, the MSK Library sees an increase in use by young “researchers-in-training” as MSK offers a variety of student programs (eg. SCORE) and internship opportunities. I always enjoy helping these students navigate the MSK Library’s resources and training them on wonderful resources like PubMed and Endnote that they will hopefully continue using throughout their careers.

What is your favorite meal OR if you could travel anywhere in the world, where would you go?
I recently traveled back to my home town of Montreal (Quebec, Canada) and was reminded of how much I miss Montreal bagels. Since you ask: A still-warm bag of St-Viateur bagels might just constitute my favorite meal…along with the cream cheese, smoked salmon, capers and onions that will go on them if you manage to get the bagels home before eating them!

2018 JCR Data Release (based on 2017 data)

On June 26, 2018, the latest update of Journal Citation Reports (JCR) was released by Clarivate Analytics (previously Thomson Reuters).

It is important to note that this latest release of JCR provides 2017 data. The 2018 data will be made available in the 2019 JCR release next June.

According to Clarivate Analytics: “The latest update to the JCR includes 11,655 total journals across 234 disciplines and 80 countries. On average, Journal Impact Factor scores increased by 10%.”

A complete list of the journal titles covered in this year’s JCR can be viewed in their 2018 titles booklet (PDF) or by searching the database via the MSK Library’s subscription that may be accessed via the MSK Library’s A-Z database list.

Of greater interest to authors may be the list of 2018 journals that received their first Journal Impact Factor with this latest data release. Being assigned a JCR Impact Factor adds a certain degree of legitimacy to a journal title and is one of the quality indicators that should be considered when exploring journal options for submitting a manuscript to for publication.

Among the newly included titles for this year, these journals in particular appeared to be potentially of interest to the MSK community:

CANCER BIOLOGY & MEDICINE (Peoples R China)
CANCERS (Switzerland)
JOURNAL FOR IMMUNOTHERAPY OF CANCER (England)
JOURNAL OF GASTRIC CANCER (South Korea)
FRONTIERS IN ONCOLOGY (Switzerland)
JOURNAL OF ONCOLOGY (United States)
JOURNAL OF ONCOLOGY PRACTICE (United States)
SEMINARS IN ONCOLOGY NURSING (United States)
WORLD JOURNAL OF GASTROINTESTINAL ONCOLOGY (United States)
ABDOMINAL RADIOLOGY (United States)
COMPUTER ASSISTED SURGERY (England)
HAND SURGERY & REHABILITATION (France)
HEPATOBILIARY SURGERY AND NUTRITION (Hong Kong)
OPERATIVE NEUROSURGERY (United States)
QUANTITATIVE IMAGING IN MEDICINE AND SURGERY (Peoples R China)
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF OLDER PEOPLE NURSING (England)
PHILOSOPHY ETHICS AND HUMANITIES IN MEDICINE (England)
JAMA CARDIOLOGY (United States)
NATURE MICROBIOLOGY (England)
PSYCHOLOGY & SEXUALITY (England)
JOURNAL OF COGNITIVE PSYCHOTHERAPY (United States)
JOURNAL OF BEHAVIORAL EDUCATION (United States)
JOURNAL OF CLINICAL MEDICINE (Switzerland)
JOURNAL OF CHILDRENS ORTHOPAEDICS (Germany)

For more information about JCR or other resources available via the MSK Library, feel free to Ask Us!

Finding Clinical Practice Guidelines

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!