Dr. Allison Betof Warner, MD, PhD, Medical Oncologist
A recent Business Insider article focuses on what it feels like to administer COVID vaccines. Experiences from practitioners in four states highlight the hope and excitement at vaccination centers across the country.
In the article, MSK’s Dr. Allison Betof Warner discusses how the pandemic shifted the focus of her work from melanoma treatment and research to COVID care. She is now vaccinating staff and cancer patients, and has found the experience rewarding and emotional:
“The opportunity to really be part of the solution and be on the frontline, not only caring for these patients, but now fixing the problem and helping prevent more patients from getting COVID — this is why you go to medical school. These are the moments that you dream about.”
With the increase in systematic review publications over the last decade came more variance and variety within the SR/evidence synthesis study design, prompting the need for even more specialized guidance. Responding to this need, various special interest PRISMA groups worked to develop “extensions” to the PRISMA reporting guidelines, their number now reaching ten.
PRISMA-Equity: Welch V, Petticrew M, Tugwell P, Moher D, O’Neill J, Waters E, White H; PRISMA-Equity Bellagio group. PRISMA-Equity 2012 Extension: Reporting Guidelines for Systematic Reviews with a Focus on Health Equity. PLoS Med. 2012;9(10):e1001333. PMID: 23222917
PRISMA-Abstracts: Beller EM, Glasziou PP, Altman DG, Hopewell S, Bastian H, Chalmers I, Gøtzsche PC, Lasserson T, Tovey D; PRISMA for Abstracts Group. PRISMA for Abstracts: Reporting Systematic Reviews in Journal and Conference Abstracts. PLoS Med. 2013;10(4):e1001419. PMID: 23585737
PRISMA-P: Moher D, Shamseer L, Clarke M, Ghersi D, Liberati A, Petticrew M, Shekelle P, Stewart LA. Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis Protocols (PRISMA-P) 2015 statement. Syst Rev. 2015;4(1):1. PMID: 25554246
PRISMA-IPD: Stewart LA, Clarke M, Rovers M, Riley RD, Simmonds M, Stewart G, Tierney JF; PRISMA-IPD Development Group. Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Review and Meta-Analyses of individual participant data: the PRISMA-IPD Statement. JAMA. 2015;313(16):1657-1665. PMID: 25919529
PRISMA extension for network meta-analyses: Hutton B, Salanti G, Caldwell DM, Chaimani A, Schmid CH, Cameron C, Ioannidis JP, Straus S, Thorlund K, Jansen JP, Mulrow C, Catalá-López F, Gøtzsche PC, Dickersin K, Boutron I, Altman DG, Moher D. The PRISMA Extension Statement for Reporting of Systematic Reviews Incorporating Network Meta-analyses of Health Care Interventions: Checklist and Explanations. Ann Intern Med. 2015;162(11):777-784. PMID: 26030634
PRISMA-CI: Guise JM, Butler ME, Chang C, Viswanathan M, Pigott T, Tugwell P; Complex Interventions Workgroup. AHRQ Series on Complex Intervention Systematic Reviews – Paper 6: PRISMA-CI Extension Statement & Checklist. J Clin Epidemiol. 2017. PMID: 28720516
PRISMA-DTA: McInnes MDF, Moher D, Thombs BD, McGrath TA, Bossuyt PM; and the PRISMA-DTA Group. Preferred Reporting Items for a Systematic Review and Meta-analysis of Diagnostic Test Accuracy Studies: The PRISMA-DTA Statement. JAMA. 2018;319(4):388-396. PMID: 29362800
PRISMA-ScR: Tricco AC, Lillie E, Zarin W, O’Brien KK, Colquhoun H, Levac D, Moher D, Peters MDJ, Horsley T, Weeks L, Hempel S, Akl EA, Chang C, McGowan J, Stewart L, Hartling L, Aldcroft A, Wilson MG, Garritty C, Lewin S, Godfrey CM, Macdonald MT, Langlois EV, Soares-Weiser K, Moriarty J, Clifford T, Tunçalp Ö, Straus SE. PRISMA Extension for Scoping Reviews (PRISMA-ScR): Checklist and Explanation. Ann Intern Med. 2018. PMID: 30178033
The latest PRISMA extension to be published in 2021 is the PRISMA-S extension which provides detailed guidance related to the preferred reporting of SR literature searches.
When conducting searches in Pubmed, a searcher may make errors, either by omission or by mistyping. In many cases (but not all) Pubmed alerts you to the error and helps you identify it.
When are you alerted to an error?
Sometimes, it happens that a searcher omits one of a pair of parentheses or double quotes, which may result in the search done not as you’ve intended and producing different results. If you made such an error, the “first line of defense” that Pubmed offers would be a message that appears right above the search results.
For example, your intended search strategy was: “lung carcinogenesis” AND (cell* OR molecular) Instead, you typed “lung carcinogenesis AND cell* OR molecular). In that case you will see, right above the search results: The following terms were ignored: “, )
The “second line of defense” could be found in Advanced Search. Details next to your Query in Advanced Search always display how your Query, or the exact search strategy you entered in the search box, was “translated” by Pubmed, i.e. what was actually processed and searched upon. So, when trying to get more details about the error and the exact place in the search where the error has occurred (especially in the case of complex and lengthy search strategies) you can go to Advanced Search and look at the Details for the search Query in question. A red Warnings icon with an Exclamation Mark would alert you to the problems and by clicking the caret symbol next to it you will see the unmatched quotes and parentheses in red in the search you entered.
Another example: you are searching with the keyword “breast” in the title or abstract fields of the Pubmed record but instead of breast[tiab], where [tiab] is a combined title/abstract field, you mistyped it as breast[taib]. You will see the following message above the search results Unknown field was ignored: [taib] and in the Advanced Search>Details you will see more details related to how Pubmed “translated” your search strategy, as shown below:
In some cases, when you enclose a phrase in double quotes intending to find references that include exactly same phrase, Pubmed actually does not find such references despite the fact that some of them do exist. That’s because Pubmed does not index all phrases and in this it differs from other databases, such as Embase, Scopus, etc. For example, if you type “chemoradiotherapy side effect*” you will be alerted by Pubmed that Quoted phrase not found: “chemoradiotherapy side effect*”. In fact, such references may be present in Pubmed but the search for this exact phrase will be “translated” by Pubmed as a broader query. Pubmed would parse the phrase and search on its components combining them with a Boolean Operator “AND”, behind the scenes. The details of how it was done can be found in Advanced Search>Details.
When are you not alerted to an error?
There are some instances where your error by omission or mistyping may go undetected. If your search includes the Boolean operator “OR” and you omitted it in error, Pubmed will not alert you to it. That’s because a space (in place of the “OR” that you’ve omitted) is treated by Pubmed as a Boolean Operator “AND”. So, your search will produce totally different results, but the error will go unnoticed.
Also, if you mistyped but the term you entered in error is still a legitimate term Pubmed would not detect anything as incorrect. In the first example, if you omit an asterisk in the keyword cell*, where the asterisk was used for truncation, allowing retrieval of references with words with different endings (e.g. cell, cells, cellular), Pubmed will process the search without noticing your error as the noun cell is a legitimate term.
Of course, if you made an error not by omission or mistyping but because of the lack of expertise, e.g. you incorrectly used an “AND” operator or a space instead of an “OR” between the terms in the same category or synonyms, Pubmed will not detect this error either. The takeaway for minimizing the chance of making such an error is taking a Library Pubmed class or, if you feel that the search results are not what you expected, consulting a Research Informationist at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center Library.
