New ASCO Recommendations, Medicare Covers New Cancer Drug, and More…

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Some of the stories that caught my attention:

  • New recommendations have been published by ASCO on the use of biomarkers to guide in the treatment for metastatic breast cancer.
  • Researchers at Cedars-Sinai have discovered a genetic biomarker responsible for the progression of many breast and prostate cancers. The findings could help to contribute to better identify patients who respond to certain types of chemotherapy drugs. Read more about the findings in the journal Scientific Reports.
  • Scientists at MD Anderson have found a link between a protein called CSN6 and patients with colorectal cancer. The results of the study have been published in the journal Cancer Cell.
  • According to a recent study published in the Journal of Investigative Dermatology, soldiers returning home from Iraq and Afghanistan have an increased risk of developing skin cancer.
  • The Obama administration announced that Medicare will start paying for the cancer drug Blincyto produced by Amgen Inc. It is currently used to treat a rare form of acute lymphoblastic leukemia.

Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials (CENTRAL) – a Staple for Systematic Reviews

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If you are a regular reader of systematic reviews (SR), chances are that you have come across a database referred to as Cochrane CENTRAL listed among the databases often used in SR search methodology. This Cochrane resource contains the citation information and abstracts (not the full-text) of published and unpublished human studies reporting on a particular study design: randomised and quasi-randomised controlled trials ONLY.

The published abstracts in CENTRAL are the controlled trials harvested from the MEDLINE and EMBASE databases using highly sensitive specialized search strategies. The rest of the content comes from Specialized Registries that are compiled and maintained by the various Cochrane Review Groups. This subgroup of unique content is derived in part by using hand-searching techniques and can include things like unpublished RCT studies reported on during scientific conference presentations. As this content may never end up appearing in the commercial databases (like EMBASE and MEDLINE), searching CENTRAL helps to combat the publication bias that may arise when searching only commercially published sources.

To access the Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials (CENTRAL) database, first launch the Cochrane Library (Wiley) from the MSK Library’s A-Z list of databases. You can then perform a search by using the search box available to bring up some results from the various components of the Cochrane Library, among which you will find (listed in the menu on the left) “Trials”. The “Trials” search results are the records from CENTRAL. If you wish to limit your search to only the CENTRAL database, then click on “Search Limits” > select “Trials” > and click on “Apply” to continue your searching in only the CENTRAL database.

To learn more about CENTRAL, ask an MSK Librarian for an in-depth tutorial.

Follow an Author’s Citation Trends in Scopus

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Want to determine which sources a particular author cites most often? Follow these easy steps in Scopus to analyze citation counts from an author’s total publications. It could be a useful way of keeping up with the literature in your area of interest…

  1. Perform an ‘Author Search’ and search for the author of interest
  2. Find the correct author from the results list and click on the author’s name
  3. From the author’s detail page, find the ‘Author History’ box on the right and click on the number next to ‘References’
  4. This opens the search results window and lists the references the author has cited across his or her publications
  5. Click on ‘Analyze search results’ and open the ‘Source’ tab
  6. Here you’ll not only see a list of the top sources the author references (and number of documents from each source), but you can also use the graph to view even more details, or create a chart in which you can compare journal metric values
  7. You can also export, print and email the information from the charts

Take a look at the video to view these steps in action. You can also ask us if you have any questions about citation metrics.