Although many of us prefer reading research articles in print format, using colorful highlighters to mark important sections we wish to return to, and hand writing notes about ideas we’d like to remember or share with colleagues later, a downside to adding annotations and highlights to printed articles is that they are not searchable nor easily shareable. The individual copy of the article that we mark up is ours and ours alone and we will have to scan through the whole text to re-locate the needed passage.

Another option: take advantage of the easy-to-use functionality of reference management software programs that allow users to create and search on electronic annotations! For example, Endnote gives users the ability to add notes and highlight text in PDFs and then to keyword search on these PDF notes.

And thanks to a browser extension offered by F1000Workspace, notes can be made directly on PDFs and webpages too! (For example, annotations and highlights can be added directly to PubMed abstracts on the Internet.)

Learn more by asking us at the MSK Library!

For several years, the MSK Library has been providing access to a “revolutionary post-publication peer review service” called F1000Prime. Originally called “Faculty of 1000” Biology (when it first launched in 2002), named for the one thousand “leading scientists and clinical researchers” providing recommendations and highlighting “the most interesting articles published in the biomedical sciences”, the faculty has now grown to more than 5,000. Amongst F1000’s many experts (organized in a structure of Heads of Faculty, Section Heads, Faculty Members, and Associate Faculty Members) are a number of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC) researchers and clinicians.

In the last year, the F1000 services have expanded quite dramatically to include F1000Workspace, “a web-based reference library and citation tool that enables users to instantly collect and annotate papers while automatically storing them in cloud.”  Although still in beta mode, F1000Workspace even offers co-authors the ability to work on a shared manuscript together in a collaborative workspace in the cloud. (Please keep an eye out for future “Resource Highlights” posts that will explore the features of F1000Workspace in more detail.)

For more information on F1000Prime, please see their FAQ or ask us at the MSK Library.

Traditional article level metrics, like the number of times a journal article is cited, are certainly useful in establishing the degree of impact that a particular research study has on its field. Especially true in the basic sciences, article citations are the currency with which researchers acknowledge the research that inspired their new ideas, as their new research findings build on those of others.  Citation counts, however, can be limited in their usefulness as they do require a considerable time lag to accumulate and so rarely provide an immediately accurate indication of impact.

Similarly, it is not uncommon in clinical research that a published study could have far-reaching, practice-changing, implications for clinical practice yet not garner a particularly noteworthy number of times cited, especially in comparison to papers in the basic sciences. As not all practicing clinicians take part in clinical research, it is very possible to have a situation where many health professionals are heavily consuming some published information but since they do not conduct research nor publish articles of their own, they will never cite (ie. acknowledge in the scholarly record) this information that may have been critical to their practice.

In comes a tool like PlumX. Continue reading →