When you are trying to locate statistical and numerical data, spending some time upfront familiarizing yourself with statistical resources and defining your need can save you a lot of time as it will help you determine what data sources are logical choices to consider consulting. The MSK Library’s Cancer Statistics LibGuide is a great place to start your search for statistics as it describes many cancer-related data resources and will help you become aware of your available options.

Here are three key questions you should ask to help define your data need:

1. What form of data are you looking for? (Are you looking for summarized data or datasets that you plan to analyze yourself?)
2. What geographical region are you interested in? (Are you interested in local, state, national, or international statistics?)
3. How recent is the data you are looking for? (Are you looking for data from 10 years ago, 2 years ago, last year, or last month?) Continue reading →

Similar to MEDLINE (PubMed), EMBASE (owned by Elsevier) is a biomedical database that indexes over 8600 journals from around the World and adds controlled vocabulary or index terms to all of its article citations. Unlike MEDLINE, however, EMBASE also indexes conference proceedings from over 5600 conferences and it uses the Emtree thesaurus instead of MeSH (Medical Subject Headings).

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Medical Subject Headings (MeSH), the National Library of Medicine’s controlled vocabulary thesaurus, makes comprehensive searching of the biomedical literature indexed in the MEDLINE/PubMed database immensely easier. Rather than require the searcher to guess how various authors from around the world may have referred to a particular concept, the indexers of the articles determine what each article is about and then apply the preferred MeSH terms accordingly to make each article more findable.

But what happens if a spot-on MeSH term for what you are looking for does not exist? That’s where MeSH qualifiers, otherwise known as MeSH subheadings, really show their value. Here’s an example to illustrate the need filled by MeSH subheadings:

Say you were interested in conducting a comprehensive search to identify studies looking at:  “a particular primary cancer (that has been surgically resected) metastasizing to a secondary site” Continue reading →