Experienced Pubmed users are enjoying the convenience of saving their search strategies and search results to their personal My NCBI accounts. We have promoted the use of these accounts and explained their features in previous blog posts.

In June 2021 the change will come to how the users log in to their personal My NCBI account. The National Library of Medicine stated its concern for user privacy as the reason for the coming change. The users will no longer be able to log in their My NCBI account with their “NCBI-managed credentials”, i.e. username and password they created specifically for MY NCBI account access.

The detailed instruction on how to change the way you log in to My NCBI using your linked accounts such as Google (your gmail credentials) and their credentials (called “federated account credentials”) can be found in the National Library of Medicine publication called NLM Technical Bulletin.

Once you have linked your account you can then log in to My NCBI using the linked account credentials. Click on Log In button in the right upper corner on the Pubmed page

and you will be prompted with a screen similar to the one below (depending on what account you would choose to link):

Enjoy using My NCBI!

Searching efficiently for clinical trials is often challenging for researchers. The majority of clinical trials are not published in peer-review publications. Therefore, the results are never reported and disseminated (1). Additionally, there are multiple clinical trial registries with considerable overlap (2).

While the aim of the International Clinical Trials Registry Platform (ICTRP), launched in 2007 by the World Health Organisation (WHO) (3), is to act as a single platform to search for clinical trials, it has been reported by Glanville and Knelangen that “even though ClinicalTrials.gov is included in the WHO ICTRP Search Portal, not all ClinicalTrials.gov records can be successfully retrieved via searches of the ICTRP Search Portal”(4). To be comprehensive when searching for clinical trials, we will need to search across multiple registers.

Here are some steps that may be helpful when searching for clinical trials:

Finding clinical trials from registries:

• International Clinical Trials Registry Platform (ICTRP)
  The ICTRP is maintained the World Health Organization.
  Please note that as of January 2021, the ICTRP search portal is experiencing a high volume search inquiries because of COVID-19 and may not be responsive.
• ClinicalTrials.gov
  ClinicalTrials.gov is provided by the National Library of Medicine (NLM). Studies registered on the website are from all 50 United States and 219 countries.
• The European Union (EU) Clinical Trials Register
  The register contains studies conducted in the European Union (EU) and the European Economic Area (EEA) as well as studies conducted outside the EU / EEA that are linked to European paediatric-medicine development.
• The following website is a comprehensive resource with links to national and international clinical trials registers: https://sites.google.com/a/york.ac.uk/yhectrialsregisters/home/clinicaltrials

Finding clinical trials with published results:

• PubMed clinical queries
  A broad therapy search will retrieve clinical trials, if you are interested in Randomized Clinical trials only, you can change the scope from broad to specific/narrow.
  
  
• The Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials (CENTRAL)
  The records are pulled mainly from the databases PubMed and Embase.
  
  

• ClinicalTrials.gov
  In the advanced search, you can select “Studies with Results” to retrieve only studies where the results have been reported:
  
  

Finding clinical trials for COVID-19:

• Trialstreamer
  “Trialstreamer is an artificial intelligence system, which finds and summarises new trial publications, registrations, and preprints in COVID-19.”
• Global Coronavirus COVID-19 Clinical Trial Tracker 
  A real-time dashboard of clinical trials for COVID-19 developed by Thorlund, Kristian, et al.
• Anticovid platform
  “Anticovid is an open access platform which gathers all available information regarding global clinical trials for SARS-CoV 2.”

For information on clinical trials at MSKCC, please visit the following page: https://www.mskcc.org/cancer-care/clinical-trials

References

1. DeVito NJ, Bacon S and Goldacre B. Compliance with legal requirement to report clinical trial results on ClinicalTrials.gov: a cohort study. The Lancet 2020; 395: 361-369. DOI: 10.1016/S0140-6736(19)33220-9.
2. van Valkenhoef G, Loane RF and Zarin DA. Previously unidentified duplicate registrations of clinical trials: an exploratory analysis of registry data worldwide. Systematic Reviews 2016; 5: 116. DOI: 10.1186/s13643-016-0283-8.
3. Karam G and Ross AL. The WHO International Clinical Trials Registry Platform: Providing global clinical trial information to all. On Medicine. 2020.
4. Lefebvre C GJ, Briscoe S, Littlewood A, Marshall C, Metzendorf M-I, Noel-Storr A, Rader T, Shokraneh F, Thomas J, Wieland LS. . Chapter 4: Searching for and selecting studies. In: Higgins JPT TJ, Chandler J, Cumpston M, Li T, Page MJ, Welch VA (ed) Cochrane Handbook for Systematic Reviews of Interventions version 61 (updated September 2020). Cochrane, 2020.

It’s the most wonderful time of the year!!

Well, perhaps that’s a bit of an over-exaggeration, but it’s exciting nonetheless! The National Library of Medicine has released its annual list of MeSH changes, including highly anticipated NEW MeSH (Medical Subject Heading) terms for 2021!

The list covers a variety of changes and updates made to MeSH, including:

• Updated terms — these are MeSH terms that have been deleted, changed, or replaced to reflect more updated terminology
  • 14 terms were updated for 2021
• New terms — these are brand new MeSH terms added
  • 277 terms were added for 2021
• Special projects — new terms added in specific subject areas to address needs
  • New behavioral and social science headings
  • New cardiovascular headings
  • New food/beverage headings
  • New infection headings
  • New organism headings
  • New persons headings

One important thing to remember is how to modify saved searches to account for the changes made to MeSH, as the changes will take place in mid-December 2020 and newly indexed citations will be reflective of these changes.

COVID-19 and its impact on MeSH

It makes sense that COVID-19 has been the cause of many of the changes going into 2021. From the onset of the pandemic, NLM was adding supplementary concepts (SCRs) throughout the year to include important concepts to help navigate the large amount of COVID-19 literature, but these supplementary concepts have limited functionality. So with 2021, NLM has announced an entire suite of COVID-19 and SARS-Cov2 related MeSH terms.

Some notable new terms related to the pandemic:

• COVID-19 — was a supplementary concept, now promoted to MeSH term
• SARS-CoV-2 — was a supplementary concept, now promoted to MeSH term
• COVID-19 Testing — was supplementary concept (Covid-19 diagnostic testing), now promoted to MeSH term
• COVID-19 Serological Testing — previously mapped to COVID-19 diagnostic testing
• COVID-19 Nucleic Acid Testing — previously mapped to COVID-19 diagnostic testing
• Physical Distancing — previously mapped to “Social Distancing”, now differentiated as “Psychological Distancing” and “Physical Distancing”
• Teleworking — new MeSH term
• Return to School — new MeSH term
• N95 Respirators — new MeSH term
• Disease Hotspots — new MeSH term
• Chain of Infection — new MeSH term