Decrease of Early Breast Cancer Mortality Rates

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An observational cohort study led by Dr. Carolyn Taylor from the University of Oxford in the U.K. showed that mortality rates for women diagnosed with early breast cancer in England decreased from a 5-year mortality risk of 14% in the 1990s to 5% in 2010-2015.

Radiology Reading Rooms
Radiology Reading Rooms

The researchers analyzed data from 512,447 women. The study included data from the England National Cancer Registration and Analysis Service between January 1993 and December 2015, with a follow-up until December 2020.

The study’s results might also help providers identify prognostic risk factors for women diagnosed with early breast cancer.
The study was published in BMJ.

Check Out the MSK Library’s COVID-19 Publication Report

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The Synapse team led by Jeanine McSweeney, Associate Librarian, Scholarly Communications, has published an online report entitled “COVID-19 Publication Report” which features a snapshot in time (April 2020 to December 2022) of 607 works from sixty-five departments and services at Memorial Sloan Kettering (MSK).

While we continue to monitor MSK-authored COVID-19 scholarly works, we wanted to pause and take a moment to analyze this body of bibliographic references and share insights such as the top scoring papers via Altmetric, the top highly cited research papers, the increased usage of preprint servers, and a networking map that illustrates the research collaborations between MSK and other organizations.

What is special about this report is the time taken to annotate these citations with lay summaries written by the Research Informationists, helping to expand potential readership to a public audience.

Synapse is a public-facing resource and the authoritative bibliographic database of MSK publications, developed and maintained by a team of skilled librarians. This database provides a record of the research output written by MSK researchers, clinicians, nurses, and other healthcare professionals.  To view other Synapse-related publications, click here.

Please feel free to reach out to me to share your thoughts about this report. We would love to hear what you think!

Donna Gibson
Director, Library Services

New eBook – Athena Unbound : Why and How Scholarly Knowledge Should Be Free for All

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Athena Unbound explores the open access movement: The past history, current conflicts and controversies, and future possibilities. The author provides analysis of the debates, and explores issues such as copyright and the economics of paying for “free” knowledge.

Topics covered include the arguments in terms of disseminating scientific research, the history of intellectual property and copyright, and the development of the university and research establishment. The author “proposes a new system that would shift costs from consumers to producers and free scholarly knowledge from the paywalls and institutional barriers that keep it from much of the world.”