Interested in performing a systematic review, but don’t know how to get started?
Want to learn the basic steps in completing a systematic review?
If you answered ‘yes’ to these questions, then the Himmelfarb Library’s ‘Systematic Review Seminar Series’ is for you!
This series will be composed of brief, biweekly lunchtime sessions covering a variety of topics which will take you from the development of a systematic review project all the way through to the creation and submission of a manuscript.
The live sessions will be held every other Wednesday at 12 p.m. via WebEx and they are designed to last around 30 minutes. The sessions will be recorded and those recordings will be posted to the series guide linked above.
The first session in the series will be: Title: Types of Reviews Location: https://gwu.webex.com/meet/tph Day: Wednesday August 18, 2021 Time: 12 p.m.- 12:30 p.m. EST
If you have any questions or if you’d like your email address to be added to the series distribution list, please contact series instructor, Tom Harrod at tph@gwu.edu.
Over the past year, the COVID-19 pandemic has altered so much in the world around us. As described in a recent article in Nature, scholarly publishing has not been immune from COVID-19 related change. This article highlights a number of the most striking changes that have occurred in recent months, showing how the pandemic has, perhaps permanently, altered the landscape of scholarly publishing.
The amount of published research on the topic of COVID-19 has been enormous. It’s estimated that from the start of the pandemic to December 2020, there have been over 200,000 articles published on COVID-19, accounting for around 6% of the total publications entered into PubMed during that time. The paper goes on to show the evolution of several trends within that literature including country of origin and topics covered. While the majority of COVID-19 related articles were published in China during the early phase of the pandemic, as the virus spread around the world, the countries publishing COVID-19 research also changed, with each new area hit by the virus producing a larger share of the total COVID-19 articles than they had before. Additionally, while a majority of the earliest articles focused on topics like modeling the epidemic and slowing the spread, topics such as mental health considerations of the pandemic have grown in prominence in recent months.
One of the most notable trends in scholarly publishing to occur in the time of COVID-19 is the rise of the preprint. Preprints are articles that are made publicly available before having undergone a formal process of peer review. Because of the need to get information in the hands of researchers and clinicians as soon as possible, a significant portion of the COVID-19 literature was released in preprint form. Pre-pandemic, medRxiv, a popular preprint repository covering medical literature, accepted 50-100 preprints per week. During the early months of the pandemic that number rose to 400-500 preprints being added per week, with the vast majority of them being about COVID-19.
Another important recent trend in the world of scholarly publishing has been the increased speed with which manuscripts are being reviewed and articles retracted. The article’s author looked at the peer review turnaround time for 11 medical journals and found that while the review time for non COVID-19 articles remains about the same (roughly 90-110 days), the review time for COVID-19 articles was significantly lower on average (10-30 days). Additionally there has been a noticeable increase in the speed with which papers have been retracted. Prior to COVID-19, the average retracted paper would go years from the time of its publication until it was pulled. During the pandemic that has dropped to months in most cases as COVID-19 related articles have garnered more attention and therefore more scrutiny.
It will be interesting to see which, if any, of these trends will prove permanent once we’ve moved beyond the current pandemic.
In a recently released technical bulletin, the National Library of Medicine announced a significant change in how users will log into their NCBI accounts. This change will affect how users get into their MyNCBI, SciENcv, and My Bibliography accounts, as all of these are accessed through the same NCBI login.
When creating a NCBI account, users are currently asked to come up with a username and password for the account; this login info is then managed directly by NCBI. However, starting June 1, 2021, it will no longer be possible to log in using these credentials. Instead, users will be required to connect their NCBI accounts to one of several federated accounts and then they will access NCBI using that login process. Acceptable federated accounts include Google, eRA Commons, or university login credentials. Accordingly, GW faculty may use their GW NetID and password to log in to their NCBI accounts once this change has occurred.
This change is being implemented to increase the security of NCBI accounts. The NLM bulletin describes the steps required to link a federated account to an NCBI account, but please don’t hesitate to reach out to Himmelfarb’s Research Support librarian, Tom Harrod (tph@gwu.edu) for more assistance.
Given the proliferation of scientific literature, it’s more important than ever to have tools which help researchers and clinicians quickly identify recent, relevant articles. This is especially true when it comes to identifying the randomized control trials (RCTs) which drive evidence-based practice in so many fields.
Considering the delay that exists from the time an article is entered into PubMed to the time that it is assigned a ‘publication type’ tag, relying on the RCT tag to identify all pertinent articles will mean missing the most recent entries. Trialstreamer’s algorithm identifies RCTs immediately upon their inclusion in PubMed allowing searchers to locate the most current RCTs. What makes Trialstreamer especially remarkable is that beyond simply identifying RCTs, its algorithm extracts information for analysis such as the elements of PICO (population, intervention, control, and outcomes), sample sizes, and an estimate of the risk of bias in the article.
In a statement released on October 29, the NIH announced the development of a new policy on data management and sharing for all researchers receiving NIH funding. The policy will require researchers to submit a data management plan as part of the budget justification section of their NIH funding application. The overall goal of this new policy is to ensure that data resulting from NIH-funded research is made accessible to the public. To achieve this, data management plans will require potential funding recipients to describe how they will responsibly organize, protect, and maintain research data while making it freely and easily accessible to the public.
This policy will not go into effect until January 25, 2023, allowing NIH-funded researchers time to bring their data management practices in line with the new policy.
Need help developing a data management plan? Feel free to contact the Himmelfarb Library’s Research Support Librarian, Tom Harrod (tph@gwu.edu) for assistance in this process.
