Our ILLiad Webpages Have a New Look!

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MSK Library users know and love our ILLiad Document Delivery service. It allows anyone with an MSK email address to access a world of information beyond MSK Library’s highly specialized cancer-related collections. This is a service that is used by researchers throughout MSK to get articles on topics ranging from angioplasty to zebrafish.

Today we’re launching new ILLiad webpages. These pages serve the same functions as before with an updated look. There are a few changes you should know about.

The new pages are mobile friendly, accessible, responsive, and generally updated in their look and feel. We hope the new pages will be intuitive to navigate for users, but if you’re having trouble, please reach out to the Document Delivery Services team.

Now, let’s get down to some specifics. Your login for ILLiad has not changed. It is your MSK network username and your employee ID number – not your MSK password. Once you log in, you may be prompted to update or confirm some information for your user profile. This information will not be shared outside the library and is only used by our staff to contact you about your requests and for some statistics within the library as to who is using our service. Complete the form and click “This information is correct” at the bottom of the page to submit your answers. You will not be able to move on to the request pages without submitting this information.

Once you confirm your contact information, you’ll reach your ILLiad dashboard. The menu items are now along the top and the left-side menu is gone. This includes a new Search field. You can search by request number, author name, article title, and more.

Some of the language has been updated to remove library jargon. The image below shows requests with new, plain language statuses.

ILLiad is still the portal for MSK library users to request scholarly material, retrieve PDF files of articles and book chapters when those requests are complete, and check on interlibrary book loans coming in from libraries across the country. We hope that these new web pages will make your experience using ILLiad even better. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to reach out to the Document Delivery Services team at ill@mskcc.org.

 

Addressing Ethical Questions at the Height of the Pandemic

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Liz Blackler

Liz Blackler, MBE, LCSW

Members of MSK’s Ethics Consultation Service recently reported on their experiences at the epicenter of the COVID pandemic in a JCO Oncology Practice article. I asked Liz Blackler, MBE, LCSW, a co-author and bioethicist who works full time on the Service, to tell me more about the article’s findings and the experiences of the Service in March and April, when requests for consultations more than doubled compared to the year prior.

MSK’s Ethics Consultation Service is made up of 10 consultants—psychiatrists, nurses, nurse practitioners, physician assistants, attending physicians, and social workers. These professionals, explained Ms. Blacker, “help mitigate [ethical] conflict in the hospital amongst staff and between patients and family members and their medical teams.”

“As a cancer hospital,” said Ms. Blackler, “we routinely manage end-of-life issues. We have a compassionate, empathetic staff who know how to handle these situations. But, in the midst of a pandemic, managing day-to-day care with no family at the bedside caused a lot of emotional distress for our staff.” Not only were they inundated by constant pandemic-related news, “they were living it day to day in the hospital.”

There were strict visitor restrictions. Staff often could not get in touch with family members of patients, and sometimes family members were also sick and unable to answer questions about care decisions. “There were real reasons why visitors were restricted,” said Ms. Blackler. “But in the setting of more PPE [personal protective equipment] and with more knowledge of how COVID is transmitted, we would want to lift or modify visitor restrictions.” Now, most patients can have one visitor.

Two issues arose that were new to the Ethics Consultation Service. The first was staff concern for their own safety. As Ms. Blackler related, “There was a level of staff distress, staff was worried about putting themselves at risk. This was early in the pandemic, when there were questions about transmission and the amount of PPE available.”

The second issue arose when patients wanted to leave the hospital. “All this was new for us,” said Ms. Blackler. “The issue was real—do we let patients leave against medical advice if we know they could potentially spread COVID to someone else?” In the end, the Ethics Consultants and medical teams encouraged patients to stay at MSK until a safe plan could be established or they tested negative for COVID.

The Ethics Consultation Service found new ways of offering support while working primarily offsite. Rather than waiting for consultation requests, Service members began offering virtual office hours twice a week for two hours at a time. “There was so much uncertainty. Just having a regular outlet was really helpful for staff,” said Ms. Blackler. “I would encourage other institutions to do that. It diffused issues before they became ethical conundrums and lowered the anxiety of staff.”

Preprints and PubMed Version Control

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As preprints become more pervasive in biomedical research, many of us may be wondering:

“How will bibliographic indexes and biomedical literature databases like PubMed be handling the version control issue presented by preprints?”

Although the introduction of preprints into PubMed is still in its pilot test phase, enough time has now passed since it began in June 2020 for some of those preprint publications to have been officially published as peer-reviewed journal articles.

How does PubMed indexing work in general?

To get a better understanding of what you can expect to see in PubMed, it’s useful to know how PubMed indexing in general works (and has worked for many years). More than any other bibliographic index, PubMed does a terrific job of quality control. The reason for this can be attributed to their strict policy of only ever assigning one PMID (unique identifier) to an individual published item.

In other words, as a publication evolves from version to version, going from its “Online ahead of print” or “prepub” version that the publisher might make immediately available to readers on their website to the eventual “final published version”, only one PubMed record is created and one PMID is assigned for that item. The PubMed record actually tracks (in the case of many but not all publishers) the history of how this one published item is processed from the point of manuscript submission to its release into the public scientific record.

Take for example this item:

Robilotti EV, Babady NE, Mead PA, Rolling T, Perez-Johnston R, Bernardes M, Bogler Y, Caldararo M, Figueroa CJ, Glickman MS, Joanow A, Kaltsas A, Lee YJ, Lucca A, Mariano A, Morjaria S, Nawar T, Papanicolaou GA, Predmore J, Redelman-Sidi G, Schmidt E, Seo SK, Sepkowitz K, Shah MK, Wolchok JD, Hohl TM, Taur Y, Kamboj M. Determinants of COVID-19 disease severity in patients with cancer. Nat Med. 2020 Aug;26(8):1218-1223. doi: 10.1038/s41591-020-0979-0. Epub 2020 Jun 24. PMID: 32581323.

In the full PubMed catalog citation record for this item dates are included related to its interaction history with the publisher (i.e., the date the manuscript was received and accepted), plus dates for when the item first entered the NLM system and was indexed in PubMed and processed for inclusion in Medline. See:

EDAT- 2020/06/26 06:00

MHDA- 2020/08/28 06:00

CRDT- 2020/06/26 06:00

PHST- 2020/04/30 00:00 [received]

PHST- 2020/06/11 00:00 [accepted]

PHST- 2020/06/26 06:00 [pubmed]

PHST- 2020/08/28 06:00 [medline]

PHST- 2020/06/26 06:00 [entrez]

Managing the indexing in this way ensures better version and quality control, as all steps are tracked and applied to the same record (i.e., only ONE record is ever created for one published item).

Note: When things are not handled in this way – as is the case with some other database vendors – you often end up with two database records for the same item, particularly if the two versions appeared in different calendar years (for example if the prepub ahead-of-print appeared in December 2019 and the final published version appeared in March 2020) and the two records are “missed” (i.e., not identified as duplicates and purged) by the database producer.   

How will PubMed indexing work in the case of preprints?

Keeping in mind that dealing with preprints is still a work in progress for the National Library of Medicine (NLM) and that their cataloging policies may likely evolve as lessons are learned from their pilot – below is an overview of what PubMed has been doing so far with preprints.

PubMed is essentially handling preprints like other database vendors (that index conference proceedings) handle meeting abstracts. In the same way that there is no guarantee that research presented as a conference abstract will not be added to (data or otherwise) if and when it appears as a published peer-reviewed journal article, there is no way of ensuring that the preprint will be exactly the same informationally once it appears as a final, peer-reviewed article. And so, logically, one should assume that the preprint (which by definition has not yet undergone peer-review) will very likely undergo considerable improvement/change as it undergoes the peer-review process and is confirmed as such.

The folks at PubMed, therefore, are creating a separate database record for the preprint and a separate record for the related journal article, each record with its own unique PMID. And because the research reported in each may not be identical (even if they may have identical titles, one could be reporting on preliminary or partial data, etc.), the two records are not being connected via citation record linking, for example, in the way that a Retraction or a Comment might be. (The preprint record, however, will appear in the results of the “Similar Articles” search algorithm and so may be brought to the readers’ attention in that way.)

The preprint citation record related to the citation above, therefore, is a unique one and looks like this in PubMed:


For more information on preprints and preprint citation records – be sure to Ask Us at the MSK Library!