New to Synapse: Additional Publication Formats

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A frequent question we are asked by our users is how to retrieve only research (or peer-reviewed) articles from Synapse. Previously our “Journal Articles” category included other formats such as editorials, commentaries, letters, reviews, guidelines, interviews etc. Identifying just research articles was difficult without looking through the Synapse records one by one – but no longer!  Beginning with 2020 publications and moving forward, we have refined this category to separate the various formats, allowing our users to more precisely retrieve their desired publication data. We will continue to also filter meeting abstracts, conference papers, book chapters, and whole books.

Here are our new categories (see full list):

Correspondence: letters to the editor, replies, and other items included in the correspondence sections of journals.

Editorial: editorials, viewpoints, commentaries, and other opinion type pieces published in journals. Also includes sections of a journal typically authored by the editorial board, such as the preface or introduction to a special issue.  

Guidelines: a set of guidelines/recommendations written on behalf of a professional group or society. May also be called a consensus statement. Examples include guidelines and related updates provided by the National Comprehensive Cancer Network.

Journal Article: presentation of original research investigations that are likely, but not always, peer-reviewed. This category includes studies such as: clinical trials, case reports, brief reports, meta-analyses, laboratory investigations, retrospective analyses, CME activities, and white papers. 

Miscellaneous: items that do not fall within other categories such as: book reviews, interviews, obituaries, debates, podcasts etc.  These works are usually not peer-reviewed.

Research Letter: original research presented in journals as correspondence.   

Review: comprehensive literature, topic, or subject summaries, including systematic reviews.   

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us.

Happy New Year!

Finding Clinical Trials

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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:

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:

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.
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Oncologic Hospital Readmissions

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Cancer patients are at a higher risk of hospital readmissions than the general population. A recent study conducted by a team at the Boston University School of Medicine (Boston, MA) identified avoidable oncologic readmissions and their causes. The researchers conducted a retrospective chart review over a six-month period, during which 203 patients were discharged. While 68.7% of readmissions could not have been avoided, the authors found that 31.3% were potentially avoidable. Most of those potentially avoidable readmissions were due to ascitic or pleural fluid reaccumulation. Based on those findings, the researchers offer solutions such as performing supervised procedures in the outpatient setting. Addressing the issues could decrease readmissions in an oncology service. The study was published in JCO oncology practice.