Category Archives: Resource Highlights

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Retracted Article Alerts Incorporated into LibKey Products, Including ONESEARCH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Here’s what it look like in practice – take, for example, this PubMed-indexed retracted article: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The database citation record gets similarly flagged as a Retracted Article in ONESEARCH: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.

“How Can I Share It” Website Simplifies Scholarly Article Sharing

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Getting a scholarly article published is a satisfying and exciting end point for research teams who likely spent months or even years carrying out their research projects. Journal publishers are key partners in helping researchers get the results of this work out and into the scientific record. Regardless of whether the journal is open access (where authors generally hold onto the article copyrights) or follows a more traditional publishing model (where a copyright transfer to the publisher occurs as part of the submission process), all publishers are eager to help their authors get the word out about the research once the paper is published.

Sharing their article, however, can sometimes get a bit complicated for authors as the sharing landscape is somewhat unclear with different journal publishers often having different copyright-related restrictions in place. In comes How Can I Share It, a website developed by a number of scholarly publishing organizations that “have agreed to work together to develop and continually improve the information, resources and tools on this site to facilitate sharing, which benefits researchers, institutions, and society as a whole.” Researchers simply need to plug in an article DOI to bring up article-specific guidance; the advice will vary depending on whether the researcher is a co-author or not.

From: https://www.howcanishareit.com/about-us

“The Can I Share It look-up tool provides academic researchers with an easy way to check where a journal article can be shared in line with the paper’s access and usage rights.“

“How Can I share It also includes information on how you can share, where you can share and recommendations for sharing sites where you can engage and collaborate with the research community. How Can I Share It endorses the voluntary principles for article sharing on scholarly collaboration networks as drafted by the STM Association.”

In the DOI search results are listed resources and tools where an author can share, organized in four categories, including: tools where…

1)      “You can share the metadata and abstract as well as a link to the article on the respective publishers’ platforms on”

2)      “You can share your author’s original (preprint) on”

3)      “You can share the accepted manuscript on”

4)      “You can share the version of record on”

This website also serves as an information hub for Scholarly Collaboration Networks (SCNs) that “are platforms that allow researchers to develop and maintain professional relationships. SCNs also enable researchers to share information and ideas, participate in discussions and embark on collaborations. Some networks do not facilitate possibilities for social interactions, but do enable collaboration through article sharing.”


For more information related to scholarly publishing be sure to check out the Support for Authors LibGuide or Ask Us at the MSK Library!

Mendeley Institutional Edition: New Social Reference Manager @MSK

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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!