For several years, the MSK Library has been providing access to a “revolutionary post-publication peer review service” called F1000Prime. Originally called “Faculty of 1000” Biology (when it first launched in 2002), named for the one thousand “leading scientists and clinical researchers” providing recommendations and highlighting “the most interesting articles published in the biomedical sciences”, the faculty has now grown to more than 5,000. Amongst F1000’s many experts (organized in a structure of Heads of Faculty, Section Heads, Faculty Members, and Associate Faculty Members) are a number of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC) researchers and clinicians.

In the last year, the F1000 services have expanded quite dramatically to include F1000Workspace, “a web-based reference library and citation tool that enables users to instantly collect and annotate papers while automatically storing them in cloud.”  Although still in beta mode, F1000Workspace even offers co-authors the ability to work on a shared manuscript together in a collaborative workspace in the cloud. (Please keep an eye out for future “Resource Highlights” posts that will explore the features of F1000Workspace in more detail.)

For more information on F1000Prime, please see their FAQ or ask us at the MSK Library.

Traditional article level metrics, like the number of times a journal article is cited, are certainly useful in establishing the degree of impact that a particular research study has on its field. Especially true in the basic sciences, article citations are the currency with which researchers acknowledge the research that inspired their new ideas, as their new research findings build on those of others.  Citation counts, however, can be limited in their usefulness as they do require a considerable time lag to accumulate and so rarely provide an immediately accurate indication of impact.

Similarly, it is not uncommon in clinical research that a published study could have far-reaching, practice-changing, implications for clinical practice yet not garner a particularly noteworthy number of times cited, especially in comparison to papers in the basic sciences. As not all practicing clinicians take part in clinical research, it is very possible to have a situation where many health professionals are heavily consuming some published information but since they do not conduct research nor publish articles of their own, they will never cite (ie. acknowledge in the scholarly record) this information that may have been critical to their practice.

In comes a tool like PlumX. Continue reading →

In existence since 1996, the Joanna Briggs Institute (JBI) is an international non-profit organization based within the Faculty of Health Sciences at the University of Adelaide in South Australia.  Similar to the most well-known of its many collaborators, the Cochrane Collaboration, the JBI’s mission is to “promote and support the synthesis, transfer and utilization of evidence through identifying feasible, appropriate, meaningful and effective healthcare practices to assist in the improvement of healthcare outcomes globally”.

In addition to its research, development, and training endeavors, JBI also is responsible for creating many resources and tools aimed at providing “you with the best available evidence to inform your clinical decision-making at the point of care”. The MSK Library recently added one of these information resources, the Joanna Briggs Institute EBP Database, to its collection – a great compliment to the library’s already substantive Evidence Based Practice toolbox. Continue reading →