Keyword Proximity Searching

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Sometimes just combining search terms (keywords) with the standard Boolean ‘AND’ operator is not granular enough to focus results in to retrieve relevant articles. Typically, in addition to Boolean Operators and double quotes for exact phrases, many databases also allow specifying that the keywords searched be within a certain number of words of each other in either direction. This bridge between the narrow exact phrase search and the broad ‘AND’ operator search is called Proximity or Adjacency searching and it uses Proximity, or Adjacency, operators. Proximity searching is not applicable to searching with subject headings, it is applicable to keyword searching only. Proximity operators help increasing specificity of the search. Typically, in complex search strategies, both Proximity and Boolean operators are used.

Proximity searching is available in major proprietary databases, including Embase, Scopus, CINAHL, Web of Science, and databases on OVID platform, such as Medline and PsycINFO. Proximity searching is not available in Pubmed.

Proximity operators and rules for using them vary by database.

An example of Proximity Operators in Embase:

The databases specific Proximity Operators and the rules for their use can be found in the Help pages for each database.

Pre-metastatic Cancer Stage Intervention, Anti-Cancer Drug Ranking Algorithm, Melanoma Vaccine and More

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  • In a new National Cancer Institute study, the researchers interfered with the cancer metastasizing process at the premetastatic stage to prevent metastatic spread and shrink tumors. The scientists used myeloid cells that were known to promote cancer metastasizing by sending a signal from the primary cancer to the other sites in the body where the metastatic spread was going to occur and lowering the immune response. The researchers added a gene to these myeloid cells forcing them to activate and strengthen the immune response. This animal study was published in Cell.
  • Researchers from Rutgers University found that bariatric surgery significantly reduced cancer risk in patients with severe obesity and nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD). The risk reduction was especially prominent in obesity-related cancers, such as colorectal, pancreatic, endometrial, and thyroid cancers, as well as hepatocellular carcinoma and multiple myeloma. The study was published in Gastroenterology.
  • An international group of researchers used Artificial Intelligence (AI) for mining “big data” to gain more insight into the development and prognosis of mesothelioma, a cancer caused by exposure to asbestos. The initial exploration revealed that mesothelioma development followed specific trajectories, which could also predict the degree of mesothelioma aggressiveness. The study was published in Nature Communications.
  • Researchers from Queen Mary University of London, UK, have developed a machine-learning algorithm that ranked cancer drugs based on their efficacy. Along the lines of personalized medicine, this will enable oncologists to select the best drugs for treating individual cancer patients. The study was published in Nature Communications.
  • Developments in Biomedical Engineering consistently create new opportunities for personalized medicine. Scientists from Japan created special hydrogel that reprogramed and reverted differentiated cancer cells into cancer stem cells within 24 hours. This innovation may help creating new stem cell targeting drugs and personalized therapies in the future. The study was published in Nature Biomedical Engineering.

Giving CRediT Where Credit is Due!

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I recently attended the NISO Plus 2021 Conference. The virtual program was filled with rich and informative sessions with a few stand-outs to include one on the value and challenges of the CRediT Taxonomy.

CRediT, which stands for Contributor Roles Taxonomy, grew from the realization that authorship and how researchers are listed on scholarly outputs fails to represent the full range of contributions made by these researchers and often doesn’t paint the full picture of the work done by each of the listed authors on the research publication. In mid-2012, the Wellcome Trust and Harvard University co-hosted a workshop to bring individuals from the publishing world, funders, and academics together to discuss alternative models to recognize research contributions. After this workshop, a pilot project was conceived, focused on developing a draft taxonomy of contributor roles that could be used. The outcome of the pilot project is described in a Nature commentary.

The end result is CRediT, 14 high-level roles that can be used to demonstrate a researcher’s contributions to the scientific scholarly output. Moving from authorship to contributorship, the researcher could be assigned to one or more roles such as: Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal Analysis, Funding acquisition, Investigation, Methodology, Project administration, Resources, Software, Supervision, Validation, Visualization, Writing – original draft, and Writing – review & editing.

Two of the presenters at this session spoke of applications to support CRediT. Alex Holcombe, a professor of psychology at the University of Sydney, developed Tenzing with his colleagues to make it easier for authors to indicate who did what on their research projects, and provided a way to format this information so that it could be easily added to their manuscript when submitting to journals that use the CRediT standard. The second speaker, Richard Wynne, founder of Rescognito, developed a tool as a free service to help recognize and promote good research. The application is built on ORCIDs which identifies who did the work and Rescognito helps to answer the question, “what did the authors’ contribute?”

The list of publishers adopting CRediT is constantly evolving and include: Cell Press, eLife, Elsevier, Oxford University Press, PLOS, Springer Nature, Wiley, and Wolters Kluwer. These are all publishers that are familiar to the MSK research community.

In reflecting about the scholarly contributions by MSK researchers and this session, I am excited for the possibilities of leveraging the Contributor Roles Taxonomy to expand how we present our authors. By identifying their level of contributions, we would be able to provide transparency into what each author did. This information could be display and highlighted in their Synapse work records or on their Research Activity Dashboards.

Donna Gibson
Director of Library Services