New Synapse Feature: Export Your Publications Directly to an Excel Spreadsheet

Synapse is used by many of our faculty, staff, and departments to track their publications and collect bibliographies and statistics for annual reporting. While bibliographies can be formatted directly within Synapse, there are other instances where one might want to export the data for further organization and analysis. This new feature allows you to export your or your department’s publications directly to a CSV file (Excel spreadsheet). Previously, Synapse only allowed for export to RIS format, which can be read by citation management tools such as Endnote. While this is still a great option for many people and purposes, not everyone is familiar with using Endnote, and there are cases where a spreadsheet is the easier or more appropriate solution to our users’ needs:

  • Simple and quick way to see which of your publications have a PMCID, and which might still need to be submitted for grant compliance.
  • Keeping internal administrative notes such as the role of postdoctoral trainees in the publication, special grants, and awards that funded the research.
  • Quickly collect a list of identifiers (such as DOI, PMID) that can then be used to query an external database such as Web of Science, Scopus, or PubMed.
  • CSV files can be imported for use with data visualization and analytics tools, such as Tableau.

To export, simply select the “Export to Endnote/Excel” option from any “Works” section of an author or group profile page. Select “Export as CSV” on the following screen and the file will be automatically downloaded to your computer. 

For more information, contact us.

New eBook: Principles and Practice of Lymphedema Surgery

The MSK library recently added the second edition of Principles and Practice of Lymphedema Surgery. This text provides step-by-step guidance on how to incorporate or expand the treatment of lymphedema in one’s practice. Principles and Practice of Lymphedema Surgery provides the latest surgical and nonsurgical approaches, from preoperative assessment to postoperative care. Major topics include the principles of the lymphatic system, diagnostic imaging, lymphedema treatment, and postoperative management.

Contributors to this text include MSK’s own Dr. Michelle Coriddi, Dr. Joseph H. Dayan, Dr. Raghu P. Kataru, and Dr. Babak J. Mehrara.

Proximity Search Functionality Added to PubMed

With over 35 million records indexed in PubMed, finding exactly the information you need in an efficient way can often prove challenging for many searchers. To help with this, NLM recently added a new search capability to the PubMed search interface called “proximity searching”. In a nutshell, proximity searching is when a search interface allows the user to look for records containing two different search terms of interest, while specifying how far part these two terms can be from one another in the title and/or abstract of the citation record.

This relational specificity allows the searcher to conduct a broader search (with more search results returned) than they would if they were phrase searching. A proximity search would also return a narrower (smaller) set of results than if the two search terms were being picked up by the search engine having appeared anywhere in the text, regardless of the distance between each other.

This ability to increase the precision of search results is what makes proximity searching a useful capability to have in the PubMed search interface toolbox. For detailed instructions and screenshots illustrating how PubMed’s proximity searching works, be sure to check out the following links:

Questions?

Be sure to Ask Us or attend an upcoming MSK Library PubMed training session.