The American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) website has a tremendous resource for consumers and patients in their Research Summaries. Users can look up information on many different types of cancer using the drop-down list and year of the ASCO Annual Meeting (dating back to 2002) in which the information appears.

There are not only cancer-specific options on the list, but genetics, prevention, screening, and survivorship are topics also covered. Patients can find cutting-edge research on their specific cancer. Each research article contains two important sections called What this Means for Patients and Questions to Ask your Doctor. There is also the option to print the information found so patients can then present their findings to their practitioners, or share with support groups, family, friends, etc.

For those consumers looking for a digest of all patient education information resulting from the ASCO Annual Meetings, there is a newsletter which aggregates all of the proceedings’ information for patients. Users can print and subscribe to this newsletter if they like.

As a change of pace, here’s a Resource Highlight post of a non-health specific tool. The Online OCR, or Optical Character Recognition, is a resource on the web that converts your PDF documents into free-text documents which can then be saved to Word, .txt, or .rtf files.

Online OCR is useful for those conducting research and dealing with large number of PDF items. By applying OCR technology to your document, it becomes easier to search for sections or topics within the paper by looking for words that describe what you want. When PDF documents are scanned from physical books or journals they do not have the capability to search for words individually. OCR alleviates this problem and allows you to find what you want quickly and efficiently.

Note that certain documents, especially copies scanned from old texts, may not covert accurately which causes indecipherable characters to appear every now and again. OCR is not always 100% accurate, but it gets you closer to searching free-text than a static photocopy of a page. Also, Online OCR has a no fee version (converting 14 pages in one hour) and membership rates for converting a lot of pages or documents.

Finding label information for dietary supplements has never been easier with the Dietary Supplement Label Database (DSLD) by the NIH (National Institutes of Health). Instead of crawling the internet for label information on different pharmaceutical company websites, you can search DSLD which aggregates all label information for U.S.-marketed dietary supplements.

The search interface of DSLD is a rich one offering users a list of possible matches for the search term entered. For example, searching for label information on the supplement melatonin retrieves 96 results. Some of these results are supplements related to melatonin while others are the supplement itself having multiple records as a result of different brands manufacturing the supplement. It’s also possible to browse all products manufactured by a specific brand name.