Category Archives: About Resources

Shedding Light on PRISMA

Posted on by

Systematic reviews (as well as other comprehensive evidence-based practice syntheses such as meta-analyses, scoping reviews, and living reviews) have in recent years become a buzzword in scientific publishing. However, many clinicians and researchers are unaware of the amount of time and effort these reviews require, and are not prepared for the process ahead.

The MSK Library’s Systematic Review Service provides resources and support for teams conducting comprehensive evidence-based reviews. One of the most important aspects of any comprehensive review is understanding, at minimum, what needs to be included. Thankfully, there are multiple tools and guidelines to assist you, including PRISMA.

What is PRISMA?

PRISMA is an evidence-based minimum set of items for reporting in systematic reviews and meta-analyses, to assist authors in improving the quality of their reviews.

PRISMA stands for: Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses

The guidelines were originally developed in 2009, and included a statement and an explanation published in a variety of biomedical journals (including JAMA, NEJM, Lancet, and BMJ). Beginning in 2017 an international team updated the PRISMA guidelines to continue to reflect the changing nature of scientific communication. PRISMA 2020 was initially released as a preprint in September 2020 and published in March 2021 in the Journal of Clinical Epidemiology, and reprinted in a number of other journals to disseminate it widely. The PRISMA 2020 Statement consists of a 27-item checklist and a flow diagram.

There are a few components to PRISMA that provide different information and are used for different things.

The PRISMA Checklist

The PRISMA 2020 statement includes a 27-item checklist that addresses the introduction, methods, results and discussion sections of a systematic review report. An expanded checklist is also available that provides detailed information and recommendations about how to properly report each item, as found in the Explanation and Elaboration paper.

The PRISMA Flow Diagram

The PRISMA 2020 flow diagram shows the flow of information through the different phases of a systematic review. It outlines the number of records identified, included and excluded, and the reasons for exclusions.

PRISMA 2020 includes four different flow diagram templates based on the type of review and the sources used to identify studies:

  • new systematic reviews, includes searches of only databases and registers
  • updated systematic reviews, includes searches of only databases and registers
  • new systematic reviews, includes searches of databases and registers, plus other sources
  • updated systematic reviews, includes searches of databases and registers, plus other sources

PRISMA Extensions

Since 2015, a variety of extensions of the PRISMA Statement have been developed to facilitate the reporting of different types or aspects of systematic reviews, including:

Using PRISMA: Do This, Not That

PRISMA is a reporting guideline, not a how-to guideline. It is only designed to assist you in how to write up (aka report) the review process.

If you are reporting a systematic review, scoping review, meta-analysis, etc using PRISMA, you can describe it in your methods section like this:

  • “this review is reported according to PRISMA”
  • “we followed the PRISMA Statement to report this review”

These are examples of descriptions should NOT be used when writing up your review:

  • “we conducted the search according to PRISMA”
  • “the review conducted in accordance with PRISMA”

PRISMA-S: Reporting Literature Searches

The latest installment of PRISMA extensions is the PRISMA-S, an extension published in 2021, which is a 16-item checklist used to complement the PRISMA 2020 checklist and flow diagram, that focuses specifically on what needs to be included when reporting the literature search strategies for your review. Again, this is now a how-to, and your methods section should not describe your literature searches as conducted using PRISMA-S. Rather, it details what information should be included when writing up or reporting your review.

Some of the details that PRISMA-S recommends including in your write-up (either in the methods section or supplemental appendices) are:

  • database name and platform (eg. MEDLINE database on the Ovid platform)
  • full search strategies for every database and register included
  • other sources or methods used to identify studies (hand searching, author contacts, grey literature, etc.)
  • any limits, filters, or restrictions used or put into the searches
  • dates of all searches and updates
  • process and software used to manage citations, including removing duplicates (EndNote, Covidence, Distiller SR, etc.)

The Future of PRISMA

The following PRISMA extensions are in development in collaboration with the PRISMA group:

Mendeley Institutional Edition: New Social Reference Manager @MSK

Posted on by

As of Spring 2023, MSK now has an institutional subscription to Mendeley Reference Manager. Mendeley Reference Manager is a “web-based citation manager that helps you simplify the tasks of building and organizing your reference library, making notes and annotations across papers, collaborating with others, and inserting citations and bibliographies into the papers you’re writing.”

How do I use my MSK institutional credentials with Mendeley?

Creating a new Mendeley account connected with your MSK institutional credentials

Connect an existing Mendeley or Elsevier account to your MSK institutional credentials

Like traditional citation management tools (for example, EndNote), Mendeley allows users to easily harvest and manage their references, to read and annotate their PDF attachments, and to cite research and format their bibliographies while they write. Similar to other social reference managers like Zotero, however, Mendeley also has some online collaboration features and academic social networking functionality that are definitely worth exploring.

Most notably, Mendeley lets users share their references and annotated PDFs using groups.

With MSK’s institutional subscription to Mendeley, users can now take advantage of 100 GB of personal storage (versus 2 GB in the free version), 100 GB of team storage (versus 2 GB in the free version), an unlimited number of private groups (versus 5 in the free version), and the ability to have 100 members per group (versus 25 in the free version).

Launched in 2008 but acquired by Elsevier in 2013, Mendeley is well-integrated into tools like Scopus and ScienceDirect that makes logging in and exporting citations to seamless. Beyond helping with citation management and formatting bibliographies, the Mendeley platform collects data on how users interact with scholarly documents, generating anonymized usage data about its readers that it then openly-shares (via the Mendeley API) with tools like Altmetrics, where the data serves as one type of social media attention or alternative metric of research impact (see an example in the recent MSK Library blog post “View the Impact of Your Research in Synapse”.

To learn more about Mendeley, explore the Mendeley training guides available on the vendor’s website and/or view a quick product video overview (2:24 min). In the upcoming weeks, please do keep an eye on the MSK Library’s Citation Management LibGuide and the training class calendar for much more to come on Mendeley.

Further reading:

Elston DM. Mendeley. J Am Acad Dermatol. 2019 Nov;81(5):1071. doi: 10.1016/j.jaad.2019.06.1291. Epub 2019 Jul 3. PMID: 31279032.

Chen PY, Hayes E, Larivière V, Sugimoto CR. Social reference managers and their users: A survey of demographics and ideologies. PLoS One. 2018 Jul 11;13(7):e0198033. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0198033. Erratum in: PLoS One. 2018 Aug 9;13(8):e0202315. PMID: 29995889; PMCID: PMC6040870.

Thelwall, M. (2018). Early Mendeley readers correlate with later citation counts. Scientometrics, 115(3), 1231-1240.

Questions? Ask Us at the MSK Library!

View the Impact of Your Research in Synapse

Posted on by

Whether for a grant proposal, annual review, CV, or just plain curiosity, authors often seek to measure the impact of their research. Synapse, our database of MSK authors and their publications, is a quick and reliable source for two common research metrics: citation counts (Dimensions), and online attention (Altmetrics).  From your author profile page, you can select any of your publications and quickly view the current research impact (if available) of your work via these two products from Digital Science.

CSF1/CSF1R signaling inhibitor pexidartinib (PLX3397) reprograms tumor-associated macrophages and stimulates T-cell infiltration in the sarcoma microenvironment. Molecular Cancer Therapeutics. 2021. DOI: 10.1158/1535-7163.Mct-20-0591

Taking a look at this example record, you can see that the article has been cited 45 times, according to Dimensions. Clicking on the citation badge links out to the Dimensions page, allowing you to directly see the works that have cited your article.  The article was also mentioned by 5 news outlets, 1 tweet, and has 35 readers in Mendeley.

Altmetric detail page

If you click on the colored donut you will be taken to the Altmetric page where you can view additional information regarding the paper’s online attention, such as direct links to news stories and tweets. 

They also provide additional details comparing the article to other tracked outputs of a similar age and/or source journals. Our example is in the top 5% of all research outputs tracked by Altmetric, and the top 97th percentile of all outputs from the same source journal and age. 

For assistance on research metrics or questions about Synapse, contact us.