There are a number of useful guideline repositories that provide search interfaces that make identifying available practice guidelines easier. Two noteworthy examples are the AHRQ’s National Guideline Clearinghouse (NGC) and the Guidelines International Network (G-I-N).

NGC “is a public resource for summaries of evidence-based clinical practice guidelines”. Their “New This Week” link provides a summary of the latest additions to their database (and can be subscribed to via email or RSS feed).  NGC does include guidelines from other countries but the database is limited to guidelines that meet certain criteria for inclusion.

Another option for guidelines from countries across the globe is the Guidelines International Network (G-I-N), which has the World’s largest international guideline library. ”The Guidelines International network, G-I-N, is a global network, founded in 2002. It has grown to comprise 105 organisations and 149 individual members representing 53 countries from all continents (March 2018).”

Although they are valuable search tools, the problem with both of these options, however, is that there is always a lag period between the date that a guideline is published and when it actually becomes available in NGC or G-I-N.

For identifying more recent guidelines, a better option may be to search a database like PubMed. PubMed even has search filters that can be applied to results in order to limit these to the publication types: Practice Guideline[ptyp] OR Guideline[ptyp]

However, limiting by MeSH indexing terms will only bring up the records that have been fully processed for the MEDLINE portion of PubMed, which are likely not the most recent additions to PubMed, as adding index terms to records may take 2-4 weeks. As such, simply keyword searching for a known guideline developer may be the best approach for identifying the most current guideline-related publications in PubMed.

For example, searching on the phrase “American Society of Clinical Oncology Clinical Practice Guideline” or “ASCO Clinical Practice Guideline Summary” in the PubMed search box will bring up the latest ASCO guidelines (or at least the majority of them), such as this one from April 2018 that includes a lead author from MSK:

Morris MJ, Rumble RB, Basch E, Hotte SJ, Loblaw A, Rathkopf D, Celano P, Bangs R, Milowsky MI. Optimizing Anticancer Therapy in Metastatic Non-Castrate Prostate Cancer: American Society of Clinical Oncology Clinical Practice Guideline. J Clin Oncol. 2018 Apr 2:JCO2018780619. doi: 10.1200/JCO.2018.78.0619. [Epub ahead of print] PubMed PMID: 29608397.

For more tips on searching for published guidelines, feel free to Ask Us!

An American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) journal that only began being published in 2017, JCO Precision Oncology introduced a new article series in 2018 called the JCO Precision Oncology Molecular Tumor Board Case Series. According to the introductory editorial by James M. Ford, MD, this series “aims to provide an important learning platform for the oncology community about how to effectively use genomic information for optimal targeted drugs and clinical trial matches”.  Based on the well-written, clearly presented information in the first paper in this series by Rodrigo Dienstmann, it certainly promises to be a very timely and useful addition to the knowledge/evidence base for precision oncology.

JCO Precision Oncology is one of two new ASCO titles that launched in 2017. According to the publisher: “JCO PO is a peer-reviewed, online-only, article-based journal publishing original research, reports, opinions, and reviews that advance the science and practice of precision oncology and define genomics-driven clinical care of patients with cancer. Innovative and timely scientific and educational content provide a deeper understanding of actionable cancer genomics, personalized translational and clinical oncology research, and recent treatment advances based on tumor molecular profiling.” The second new title is JCO Clinical Cancer Informatics: “JCO CCI is an online-only interdisciplinary journal publishing clinically relevant research based on biomedical informatics methods and processes applied to cancer-related data, information, and images.”

Both of these ASCO titles are not yet fully-indexed in MEDLINE or PubMed and so only the publicly available papers deposited in PubMed Central will appear indexed in PubMed. As such, the best way to currently access the content of these journals is by going directly to their respective JCO websites. To view the current NLM Catalog record of each journal that indicates the journal’s Current Indexing Status, click on each of their titles: JCO Precision Oncology and JCO Clinical Cancer Informatics. Please note that as these journals publish more articles over time and establish themselves as reliable, authoritative titles, their indexing status in PubMed/Medline will be re-evaluated by the National Library of Medicine (NLM) and will likely change.

These two journal titles have also been added to the collections of the MSK Library – see their respective MSK Library catalog records (that include their Online access link to the full-text) by clicking on their titles: JCO Precision Oncology and JCO Clinical Cancer Informatics. If accessed from off-campus (ie. from a device not on the MSK network), a remote access login may be required. For more information about these journals or other MSK Library resources, feel free to contact us!

The “Statement on Article Publication Resulting from NIH Funded Research”, released on November 3, 2017 by the National Institutes of Health, stressed that “authors are encouraged to publish their results in reputable journals” because publications using questionable practices “may call into question the credibility of the research they report”.

In the statement, researchers were directed by the NIH to these useful resources to help guide their journal selection decisions:

• Think Check Submit
• Academics and scientists: Beware of predatory journal publishers
• Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals
• Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing

In January 2018, the National Library of Medicine (NLM), part of the NIH and responsible for PubMed and PubMed Central, will further assist researchers in selecting more reputable journals by changing the way that journal titles NOT in the NLM collection are displayed in the NLM Catalog, LocatorPlus, and PubMed’s link to Journals in NCBI Databases.

NLM includes the records of journals that have officially been selected for inclusion in the Library’s collection (based on journal guidelines from the NLM Collection Development Manual), as well as, journals that have NOT been chosen for inclusion in the collection  but still appear in the NLM Catalog “to support the processes of NLM products and services such as PubMed Central (PMC), MEDLINE, GenBank, interlibrary loan, and others”. As such, it has been very confusing up until now for users of the NLM Catalog records to distinguish between the reputable titles officially selected for inclusion in the NLM collection and those not deemed worthy for inclusion by NLM’s collection development librarians.

The Library’s decision regarding a journal title’s inclusion in the NLM collection can be considered as a quality indicator. Researchers will now be able to use this information to guide their decision-making when trying to identify credible publications worthy of submitting their manuscripts to for publication.The new notation (Collection Status: Not in the NLM Collection) should make it more obvious to users of the NLM Catalog as to which journal titles were evaluated and selected for inclusion in the Library’s collections by NLM librarians versus those titles that were NOT.

Fig. 1. “Advanced techniques in biology & medicine”[Jour] search in the NLM Catalog

For more guidance on evaluating the quality of journals and avoiding predatory journal publishers, feel free to Ask Us at the MSK Library.