Good-bye 2019 and Welcome 2020!

Posted on by

Happy New Year to our User Community and our Library Blog Readers. I’d like to spend some time reflecting on last year’s accomplishments and research support provided by library staff by sharing some key library metrics and updates we track. Our physical space had over 110,700 in-person visits, which was an increase of over 7,000 visits in 2018.  Our website saw an increase of close to 600 virtual visits going from 41,768 (2018) to 42,355 (2019).

Most impressive was usage of the electronic journal collection by MSK staff.  In 2019, we recorded 1,922,211 downloads of full text articles and this count doesn’t include December usage. In comparison, in 2018, 1,920,937 journal articles were downloaded showing an increase of 1,274.  However, if you take the average downloads per month to account for the missing usage for December 2019, this brings the increase for 2019 to about 176,020. Now that’s a metric!

As for research requests, the Research Informationist team received 916 emails and while this number was slightly higher in 2018 (924), the amount of time devoted to conducting, interpreting, and sending on-target results increased by over 44 hours in 2019 (1,636 hours in 2019).  These client interactions do not include requests we receive via Ask-a-Librarian, chat, phone, or in-person conversations.

While we maintain a very focused journal collection, we enhance this collection by obtaining journal articles and other content (books, book chapters, dissertations, etc.) via Document Delivery Services (DDS). Our client requests for content outside our collection went down slightly in 2019. The DDS team filled 12,874 requests in 2019 and 13,001 in 2018. Most individuals don’t like to see a metric decrease, but in this case, we can attribute the lower number to our users leveraging the current collection and what they can access instantly!

We also achieved our defined 2019 goals.  Synapse now includes a Research Activity Dashboard for both groups and individuals. We finished the 2018 Synapse Publications report and managed to ingest four years of retrospective content!  ILLiad (Document Delivery) was upgraded and we implemented client feedback from usability testing to improve ONESEARCH, our search and discovery tool located on the library website.  ONESEARCH enables users to search multiple MSK collections through a single search box.

We were able to get our beta version of the MSK Data Catalog up and running and look forward to launching this resource in 1Q2020.  And finally, we started work on our client and metric tracking system which we also hope to launch in 2020. This system will improve how the library staff handles all our client requests.

As we do every year, in 2020 we will continue to focus on the day-to-day operations of the MSK Library and on our commitment to engage our user community to better understand their information needs. We look forward to hearing from you.  Better yet, we look forward to partnering with you to see how we can integrate library resources and services in your day-to-day workflows!

For any questions regarding our collections or services, don’t hesitate to ASK US.

Donna Gibson
Director of Library Services

Search Tips for Updating a CV

Posted on by

When you are updating a CV, it’s generally a good idea to search in more than one bibliographic database, especially if your goal is to capture all of an author’s publications, regardless of format (journal articles, book chapters, meeting abstracts, etc). Depending on the discipline, it may be likely that authors are publishing in journals that are not necessarily classified as “biomedical” and so may not qualify for indexing in a database like PubMed/MEDLINE.

To conduct a comprehensive search (ie. one that does not miss any works), it is advisable to start your search in PubMed (using multiple name variations if needed) but then to also search in two other multidisciplinary databases that the MSK Library subscribes to:

1) Scopus
2) Web of Science (WoS)

Both of these databases now offer an “Author Search” option that leads to a profile page for that author (where you can see their list of documents, as well as, links to documents that cite these publications). For example, see Dr. Craig B. Thompson’s Scopus profile. Another resource available to you is Synapse, the MSK Library’s database of MSK-authored publications. As you can see from Dr. Thompson’s Synapse profile, however, only his works produced while affiliated with MSK are included.

All four of these resources include options for exporting records to citation management tools like Endnote  (see the MSK Library’s workshop schedule for Endnote training options). Once the citation records are transferred from each of these four resources (PubMed, Scopus, Web of Science, and Synapse) into Endnote, the duplicates can be removed, leaving a unique list of titles that can be formatted and added to the CV.

Note: These four resources will identify scholarly publications by the author. If citations for books and government reports, or works published in popular magazines, newspapers, social media outlets, etc., are also needed, additional databases like GeneralOneFile should be consulted, in addition to Google, Google Scholar, WorldCat, NLM LocatorPlus, Library of Congress Catalog, and possibly other sources.

Feel free to Ask Us if you have any questions or would like to schedule a training consultation on this topic.

Largest Reduction in Year-to-Year U.S. Cancer Death Rate Reported

Posted on by

The cancer death rate in the United States dropped 2.2% from 2016 to 2017, the most recent data available. This is the largest annual decrease ever reported.

Figure 2 from "Cancer, 2020"

“Long‐term trends in cancer incidence rates for all cancers combined by sex.” From Siegel, R. L., Miller, K. D., & Jemal, A. (2020). Cancer statistics, 2020. CA: a cancer journal for clinicians, 70(1), 7–30. doi:10.3322/caac.21590.

In discussing this American Cancer Society data, numerous outlets quoted MSK physicians. In The Wall Street Journal, Dr. Helena Yu pointed to advances in immunotherapy as one factor in the decline. On NBC Nightly News, Dr. Larry Norton mentioned these treatment advances while describing some areas of concern. While screening is “very good” for colorectal cancer and breast cancer, he said, “not everybody is taking advantage of that.”

Stat News and Biopharmadrive.com included content tweeted by Dr. Peter Bach. He noted that the increase in other causes of death, like suicide and overdoses, may have contributed to the decline in cancer mortality.