Category Archives: About Resources

Retracted Article Alerts Incorporated into LibKey Products, Including ONESEARCH

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According to the co-founder of the Retraction Watch Database, Ivan Oransky, “Retraction Watch has witnessed a retraction boom since its founding 12 years ago”. This rise in retracted articles has translated into an increased risk of scholarly authors inadvertently citing a retracted paper without realizing it.

To mitigate this risk, a variety of library tools have started incorporating functionality that notifies their users whenever they come across an article that has been signposted as a retraction. To keep things as seamless as possible, these tools are not requiring their users to pause their research and jump to a second library product to look something up, but rather are incorporating these retraction flags/alerts as a safety “speed bump” in their process.

For example, Third Iron’s LibKey products like the MSK Library’s ONESEARCH discovery tool has begun including retraction status flags and reasons to help searchers make better informed decisions just as they are about to access the full-text PDF format of articles.

Here’s what it look like in practice – take, for example, this PubMed-indexed retracted article:

Hassan M, Watari H, AbuAlmaaty A, Ohba Y, Sakuragi N. Apoptosis and molecular targeting therapy in cancer. Biomed Res Int. 2014;2014:150845. doi: 10.1155/2014/150845. Epub 2014 Jun 12. Retraction in: Biomed Res Int. 2020 Aug 28;2020:2451249. PMID: 25013758; PMCID: PMC4075070.

The database citation record gets similarly flagged as a Retracted Article in ONESEARCH:

However, the retracted status becomes most obvious to the user at the critical point when they are about to decide whether or not they should invest time reading the full-text article:

Learn more About Article Retractions in Third Iron products or Ask Us at the MSK Library.

Check Out the MSK Library’s COVID-19 Publication Report

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The Synapse team led by Jeanine McSweeney, Associate Librarian, Scholarly Communications, has published an online report entitled “COVID-19 Publication Report” which features a snapshot in time (April 2020 to December 2022) of 607 works from sixty-five departments and services at Memorial Sloan Kettering (MSK).

While we continue to monitor MSK-authored COVID-19 scholarly works, we wanted to pause and take a moment to analyze this body of bibliographic references and share insights such as the top scoring papers via Altmetric, the top highly cited research papers, the increased usage of preprint servers, and a networking map that illustrates the research collaborations between MSK and other organizations.

What is special about this report is the time taken to annotate these citations with lay summaries written by the Research Informationists, helping to expand potential readership to a public audience.

Synapse is a public-facing resource and the authoritative bibliographic database of MSK publications, developed and maintained by a team of skilled librarians. This database provides a record of the research output written by MSK researchers, clinicians, nurses, and other healthcare professionals.  To view other Synapse-related publications, click here.

Please feel free to reach out to me to share your thoughts about this report. We would love to hear what you think!

Donna Gibson
Director, Library Services

New eBook – Athena Unbound : Why and How Scholarly Knowledge Should Be Free for All

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Athena Unbound explores the open access movement: The past history, current conflicts and controversies, and future possibilities. The author provides analysis of the debates, and explores issues such as copyright and the economics of paying for “free” knowledge.

Topics covered include the arguments in terms of disseminating scientific research, the history of intellectual property and copyright, and the development of the university and research establishment. The author “proposes a new system that would shift costs from consumers to producers and free scholarly knowledge from the paywalls and institutional barriers that keep it from much of the world.”