Category Archives: About Resources

Five Year-End Ways to Supercharge Your Academic Productivity in 2024

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As end of the year approaches, now is a great time to take care of some of the scholarly tasks that you may have been putting off and to plan for incorporating some new habits into your academic workflows.

Five tasks that can help you start off the new year on the right foot:

1) Set-Up Automated Alerts
The MSK Library provides access to a plethora of useful research tools, many of which give users the option to save their past searches and set-up automated alerts based on these (often referred to as current awareness alerts) that will continue to push out search results to them into the future. Many in the MSK community are aware of this functionality being offered by literature databases, like PubMed, but they may not realize that other types of alerts exist and may be useful for them to explore. Below are some selected examples that will be highlighted to demonstrate the breadth of possibilities:

  • Scholarly Literature Subject Search Alerts – Learn more
    Get an alert when a new article of your interest is added to PubMed.
  • Author Citation Alerts – Learn more
    Receive an email alert once your newly published paper is indexed in a database. Journal article generally appear in PubMed first, however, if you wish to track other types of publications, like meeting abstracts, consider using a tool like EMBASE.
  • Document Citation Alerts – Learn more
    Be informed whenever a new publication cites your work using Scopus.
  • Journal Table of Contents Alerts – Learn more
    Set-up a ClinicalKey electronic table of contents alert by clicking on the “Subscribe” button next to the journal titles of interest to you.
  • Clinical Evidence Alerts – Learn more
    Keep on top of the latest medical news, research and guidelines with resources like NEJM Journal Watch.
  • Grant Funding Opportunity Alerts – Learn more
    Save searches and track new grant funding opportunities using Pivot-RP.
  • MSK Library New Blog Post Alert – Learn more
    Receive the latest MSK Library blog posts via email.

2) Update Your Author Profiles and Academic CV
MSK researchers and scientists can visit their profile page in Synapse, the MSK Library produced database of MSK-authored works, to review the new works added to their profile page in 2023. Records from Synapse can be exported in the RIS or CSV formats, allowing citations to be easily transferred to a citation manger or spreadsheet for use in CV/resume updating. The ORCID@MSK application can then be used by MSK authors who wish to push their works from Synapse to their ORCID profile page. Once updated, ORCID profile records can then be used to update a researcher’s SciENcv.

3) Ensure Your Publications Comply with the NIH Public Access Policy
As you update your CV, take note of whether you have any citations that have not yet been assigned a PMCID# but need to comply with the NIH Public Access Policy. See the MSK Library’s NIH Public Access Policy LibGuide for assistance and to learn more.

4) Explore 2024 Conference Dates & Abstract Submission Deadlines
PubsHub is a tool that many are familiar with as a good resource for identifying good journal contenders to submit a manuscript to. In addition to its Journals module, however, this tool also includes a scientific Congresses module, where users can find out about upcoming meetings and conferences. Included is information that is useful for planning like abstract submission deadlines, location, and dates of the event, and search results can be filtered by type of attendee, whether CME/CE credit opportunities are offered at the event, etc.

5) Identify CME Opportunities/Create a Continuing Education Credit Plan
Several of the library’s resources, particularly the Evidence Based Point of Care/Clinical Decision Support tools, allow MSK users to earn CME points/credits if they register for a personal account.

Best wishes to all for a joyous and peaceful holiday season and New Year 2024!

Questions? Ask Us at the MSK Library.

Making Research Data Available on Mendeley Data When You Publish in an Elsevier Journal

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Most people who are familiar with Mendeley know it as the web-based citation manager that has been around for about 15 years (owned by Elsevier since 2013) and that MSK now has an institutional subscription to. Another Elsevier product, Mendeley Data, was released in April 2016 and is “an open, free-to-use research data repository, which enables researchers to make their research data publicly available.” The tool is freely-available to researchers in all disciplines and can be used to share unpublished data privately within a research team or to upload and publish data linked to/from a published journal article.

From Elsevier Support:

“Many Elsevier journals now offer authors the ability to submit research data as part of the article submission process, and research datasets submitted in this way will be stored and independently available on Mendeley Data, linked to/from your published article. The Guide for Authors for the journal you are planning to submit to will indicate if this is available.”

For an example of what this looks like in practice – see:

Article: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34375669/

    • Stewart JR, Lang ME, Brewer JD. Efficacy of nonexcisional treatment modalities for superficially invasive and in situ squamous cell carcinoma: A systematic review and meta-analysis. J Am Acad Dermatol. 2022 Jul;87(1):131-137. doi: 10.1016/j.jaad.2021.07.067. Epub 2021 Aug 8. PMID: 34375669.

Dataset: https://data.mendeley.com/datasets/dcvzp8y5g4/1

    • Stewart, Jacob; Lang, Margaret; Brewer, Jerry (2021), “Non-excisional treatment of SCC and SCCIS Supplemental”, Mendeley Data, V1, doi: 10.17632/dcvzp8y5g4.1

There are multiple advantages to having the option of making datasets available on Mendeley Data, including overcoming some annoying realities of using scholarly literature. First, not all journals are able to provide authors with unlimited space to share their research data – whether that is within the published article or within the Supplemental Materials section/Appendices (which may or may not be available as an option). Second – if the journal is behind a paywall and not openly-available, the supplemental materials will generally need to be obtained by the reader (who does not have access to a paid subscription) separately via inter-library loan (ILL) if the datasets are needed since article supplemental materials are not typically obtained by default via ILL, only by special request.

As such, having an open, independent place online where readers can easily access any related datasets makes it more likely that they will go to them if a question arises when they are reading the research paper. Also, Mendeley Data assigns published datasets persistent DOIs (digital object identifiers) and provides usage metrics thanks to integration with Plum Analytics. Furthermore – all published datasets in the repository can be searched and discovered independent of the published paper as each dataset has its own metadata, making it more likely to be found and potentially re-used/properly cited by other researchers.

Learn more:

Swab, M. Mendeley Data (2016). Journal of the Canadian Health Libraries Association, 37 (3), pp. 121-123. https://journals.library.ualberta.ca/jchla/index.php/jchla/article/download/28162/20988

Garcia Morgado, J.Open data – How to make the data available with Mendeley Data
(2019) XVIII Workshop REBIUN de Proyectos Digitales/VIII Jornadas OS Repositorios
September 25-27, 2019, León [Online]. Available at https://buleria.unileon.es/handle/10612/11221

Haak W, García Morgado J, Rutter J, Zigoni A, Tucker D. Mendeley Data. Research Data Sharing and Valorization: Developments, Tendencies, Models: Wiley; 2022. p. 153-73.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/9781394163410.ch9

Questions? Ask Us at the MSK Library!

New eBook: Davis’s Drug Guide for Nurses (2023)

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Davis’s Drug Guide for Nurses provides comprehensive, up-to-date drug information in well-organized, nursing-focused monographs. It also includes extensive supplemental material in 14 appendices, thoroughly addresses the issue of safe medication administration, and educates the reader about 50 different therapeutic classes of drugs.

The 18th edition now includes Medication Safety Tools and even more information about health care’s most vulnerable patients: children, the elderly, pregnant women, and breast feeding mothers. More pharmacogenomic information has been added throughout numerous monographs to guide the nurse in selecting and monitoring various drug therapies.