Category Archives: Director’s Reflections

Learn about the library from the Director’s perspective

Did You Know? October is National Medical Librarians Month!

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Join us in celebration and raising awareness of the significant role our health information professionals (AKA) librarians contribute to research and medical activities. Check out the Memorial Sloan Kettering Library team who provide evidence-based information to our physicians, nurses, pharmacists, students, and other healthcare professionals across the Center and all our MSK locations. They also support patients and their caregivers when they need reliable cancer information.

This year’s theme, “Yes, we do that!” opens the door and invites our user community to reach out and discover what we do and how we can support their daily work.

If you are curious about how the MSK library staff can support you, feel free to contact me. You can also visit the MSK Library website and start exploring our digital collections, resources, and the services available to you.


Need help finding that crucial piece?

Donna Gibson, Director, Library Services
PS: View other promotional and marketing materials designed by the Medical Library Association.

Curious About the Research Conducted at Memorial Sloan Kettering in 2022?

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Now you can explore the 2022 Synapse Publications Report and view an analysis, with references, of the intellectual output of MSK!   

Cover of the 2022 Synapse Publications Report produced by the MSK Library.

For 2022, 5,992 works were ingested (13% increase from last year), and we created 612 new Synapse author profiles. Breaking the works down by publication format, we noted: Journal Articles (2,399), Meeting Abstracts (2,196), Reviews (608), Editorials (356), Correspondence (116), Guidelines (111), Research Letters (82), Conference Papers (27), Book Sections (35), Books (2), and Miscellaneous (60).

This report also contains visuals that showcase our authors’ research collaborations within the United States and internationally.

Synapse is a public-facing resource and the authoritative bibliographic database of MSK publications, maintained by a dedicated team of information professionals. While this report reflects the year in review, the Synapse database provides a record of the intellectual output written by our authors dating back to 1985.

If you’re curious about past years, you can review Synapse reports going back to 2016, as well as two theme-based special reports.

Feel free to send me an email and let me know what you think about this year’s report, or if you have any suggestions for a special report.

Donna Gibson
Director, Library Services

Check Out the MSK Library’s COVID-19 Publication Report

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The Synapse team led by Jeanine McSweeney, Associate Librarian, Scholarly Communications, has published an online report entitled “COVID-19 Publication Report” which features a snapshot in time (April 2020 to December 2022) of 607 works from sixty-five departments and services at Memorial Sloan Kettering (MSK).

While we continue to monitor MSK-authored COVID-19 scholarly works, we wanted to pause and take a moment to analyze this body of bibliographic references and share insights such as the top scoring papers via Altmetric, the top highly cited research papers, the increased usage of preprint servers, and a networking map that illustrates the research collaborations between MSK and other organizations.

What is special about this report is the time taken to annotate these citations with lay summaries written by the Research Informationists, helping to expand potential readership to a public audience.

Synapse is a public-facing resource and the authoritative bibliographic database of MSK publications, developed and maintained by a team of skilled librarians. This database provides a record of the research output written by MSK researchers, clinicians, nurses, and other healthcare professionals.  To view other Synapse-related publications, click here.

Please feel free to reach out to me to share your thoughts about this report. We would love to hear what you think!

Donna Gibson
Director, Library Services