Drug Information Sources & their Mobile Apps

There are a number of drug information resources, some available via subscription and some freely-available, that are now accessible both via Internet browser and via mobile apps.

For example:

  1. Lexicomp Online (Wolters Kluwer) which “provides access to the approved drugs and dosage forms used at Memorial Sloan Kettering (Hospital Formulary). The Pharmacy and Therapeutics Committee selects drugs for addition to the Hospital Formulary based on therapeutic efficacy, toxicity, and cost.” The Lexicomp mobile app can be downloaded at no charge.
  2. The Lexicomp clinical content can also be accessed from within UpToDate. Please note that as of 2019, the MSK Library’s subscription to UpToDate has been upgraded to UpToDate Anywhere, which allows for remote access to this resource. Users have the option to either install the UpToDate Mobile App (on up to two devices free of charge) or to use UpToDate’s Mobile Web (for which there is nothing to install).
  3. Micromedex (Truven) is an “evidence-based source for drug dosage, drug interactions, and side effects information”. Like Lexicomp Online, it also contains some patient education materials. The Micromedex app can also be downloaded to a mobile device.
  4. Drug Information Portal (National Library of Medicine) “provides a gateway to selected drug information from the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM) and other key U.S. Government agencies. Many foreign drugs and medications are also covered in the resource.” This resource does not have a downloadable app but it does have a specially-designed mobile site.
  5. Drug@FDA (Federal Drug Administration) “contains the list of FDA-approved oncology drugs and regulatory information”. The Drugs@FDA Express app can be downloaded.

Find out more about these tools and how they compare to each other from these articles from the library & information science literature:

Chatfield, Amy J.. “Lexicomp Online and Micromedex 2.0Journal of the Medical Library Association : JMLA vol. 103,2 (2015): 112–113.

Patel, Risha I and Robert D Beckett. “Evaluation of resources for analyzing drug interactionsJournal of the Medical Library Association : JMLA vol. 104,4 (2016): 290-295.

Vaughan, K T L et al. “An evaluation of pharmacogenomic information provided by five common drug information resourcesJournal of the Medical Library Association : JMLA vol. 102,1 (2014): 47-51.

If you have any questions about drug information resources or any other MSK Library databases, please feel free to Ask Us!

Specialized PRISMA Reporting Guidelines

It has been almost a decade since the publication in mid-2009 of the “Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses” statement, more commonly referred to as the PRISMA statement, which replaced the QUOROM (Quality of Reporting of Meta-analyses) statement published ten years before, in 1999.

1: Moher D, Liberati A, Tetzlaff J, Altman DG; PRISMA Group. Preferred reporting items for systematic reviews and meta-analyses: the PRISMA statement. PLoS Med. 2009 Jul 21;6(7):e1000097. PMID: 19621072;  PMCID: PMC2707599.

2: Moher D, Cook DJ, Eastwood S, Olkin I, Rennie D, Stroup DF. Improving the quality of reports of meta-analyses of randomised controlled trials: the QUOROM statement. Quality of Reporting of Meta-analyses. Lancet. 1999 Nov 27;354(9193):1896-900. PMID: 10584742.

Standardizing and improving the quality of reporting methods benefits everyone. PRISMA makes it easier for researchers to strive for and achieve more completeness in their reporting of systematic reviews, which in turn makes it easier for readers of published systematic reviews to obtain a more complete picture of the research that was carried out, increasing the likelihood that they will trust – and therefore make use of – the reported results.

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Endnote X9 Upgrade Available, New Features

Endnote X9 is now available at MSK. If you have not received an update already, please call the Help Desk at 123-3337 or 646-227-3337 to have the latest version installed.

New noteworthy features include Endnote X9’s increased functionality with regards to sharing, the addition of four new reference types (e.g., social media), and its vastly expanded integration with a citation analysis database tool called Web of Science (also owned by the same parent company, Clarivate Analytics) which includes Science Citation Index and Journal Citation Reports.

Share Group

Endnote has expanded the sharing capabilities in X9 to allow for not just the sharing of a Group with others – thereby extending read-only or read-and-write access to them – but of an entire Endnote library. Also, whereas previously sharing Groups would have to be initiated via one’s Endnote Online account, this function can now be initiated from within the desktop version by going to Endnote > Groups > Share Group.

Manuscript Matcher  (click to see short video demo).

By providing Endnote’s Manuscript Matcher tool (found using the menu options by going to Endnote > Groups > Manuscript Matcher or starting in Word > Endnote X9 tab > Manuscript Matcher), with “key pieces of information” including manuscript title, abstract and references, Endnote will return a list of between two and ten journal title recommendations along with some analysis and journal quality metrics such as JCR® Impact Factor information. This list is generated using a proprietary search algorithm based on text mining and citation analysis (so including the references will actually improve the accuracy of the recommendations by 30% according to the vendor).

Create Citation Report

Another interesting feature that can now be launched from within Endnote is Clarivate’s Citation Report. After creating a group of citations, you can go to Endnote > Groups > Create Citation Report and Endnote will search for the citations in your Group in the Web of Science and generate a Citation Report. This snapshot of scholarly impact will include a variety of metrics, including each individual paper’s cited reference count. This could provide users with a quick and easy way of establishing which paper out of a batch of database search results may have had the highest impact since its publication.

If you are new to Endnote or would like a training refresher, be sure to check out the MSK Library’s workshop schedule for a list of upcoming Endnote classes (updated to the end of February).