June 2009

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Tips for Locating and Citing the PMCID

For the past year, in accordance with the NIH Public Access Policy ( http://publicaccess.nih.gov/FAQ.htm#a1 ) , authors must include the PubMed Central reference number (PMCID) when citing their NIH-funded papers in NIH applications, proposals or progress reports.

For example:

Sala-Torra O, Gundacker HM, Stirewalt DL, Ladne PA, Pogosova-Agadjanyan EL, Slovak ML, Willman CL, Heimfeld S, Boldt DH, Radich JP. Connective tissue growth factor (CTGF) expression and outcome in adult patients with acute lymphoblastic leukemia. Blood. 2007 April 1; 109(7): 3080–3083. PMCID: PMC1852221

Locating the PMCID for these papers can be challenging.  Here are a few tips for locating the PMCID:

• The National Library of Medicine has a converter ( http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/pmctopmid ) that uses PubMed IDs (PMIDs) to look up PMCIDs, and vice versa. Users can enter PMIDs from their PubMed Clipboard. For example, an author could look up all their publications in PubMed, save them to the clipboard, and use the converter to find the PMCIDs.

• Authors sometimes get confused between PubMed Central and PubMed. PubMed Central is a full text archive. Its identifer, the PMCID, is composed of the letters ‘PMC’ followed by digits. PubMed is an indexing service and its identifer, the PMID, is only composed of digits. Authors can find PMCIDs for a paper in the AbstractPlus Display of PubMed. See (http://publicaccess.nih.gov/FAQ.htm#c9 ) for more information.

• If the PMCID is not available in PubMed under the AbstractPlus display, then the PMCID # has not been assigned to the manuscript.  There are two other options for demonstrating compliance with the NIH when citing items without the PMCID (http://publicaccess.nih.gov/FAQ.htm#c7):
  
  1. Use PMC Journal – In Process if the journal publishing the article is on this list: (http://publicaccess.nih.gov/submit_process_journals.htm). 

For example:

Sala-Torra O, Gundacker HM, Stirewalt DL, Ladne PA, Pogosova-Agadjanyan EL, Slovak ML, Willman CL, Heimfeld S, Boldt DH, Radich JP. Connective tissue growth factor (CTGF) expression and outcome in adult patients with acute lymphoblastic leukemia. Blood. 2007 April 1; 109(7): 3080–3083. PMCID: PMC Journal - In Process

2. Use NIH Manuscript Submission Reference Number (NIHMSID), available at http://www.nihms.nih.gov/, if the journal is not on the list

For example:
Cerrato A, Parisi M, Santa Anna S, Missirlis F, Guru S, Agarwal S, Sturgill D, Talbot T, Spiegel A, Collins F, Chandrasekharappa S, Marx S, Oliver B. Genetic interactions between Drosophila melanogaster menin and Jun/Fos. Dev Biol. 2006 Oct 1; 298(1): 59-70. NIHMSID: NIHMS44135

NIH Public Access Policy official website: http://publicaccess.nih.gov/index.htm

If you have questions about locating the PMID or the PMCID, please contact the Information Desk at 713-792-2282 or email us at RML-Help@mdanderson.org.

SCOPUS Affiliation Search

SCOPUS, a core database for literature searching, released a new Affiliation Search to find information about publishing trends by institution.  The affiliation search is one way to locate content published by M.D. Anderson authors as well as metrics about collaborating institutions.  According to the data available in SCOPUS, M.D. Anderson authors have published 10 or more articles in 2009 in the following journals:

• International Journal of Radiation Oncology Biology Physics (20 articles)
• Gynecologic Oncology (18 articles)
• Biology of Blood and Marrow Transplantation (13 articles)
• Cancer (10 articles)
• Annals of Surgical Oncology (10 articles)

Our top collaborating affiliations for 2009 include:

• UT Health Science Center (46 articles)
• Baylor College of Medicine (37 articles)
• Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (19 articles)
• National Cancer Institute (16 articles)
• Mayo Clinic (13 articles)
• Medical College of Wisconsin (13 articles)
• UT Southwestern Medical Center (11 articles)
• Brigham and Women’s Hospital (10 articles)

During library testing of the Affiliation Search option, it identified approximately 70% of MD Anderson's publications in Scopus, so it is best to interpret Affiliation Search results with this in mind.

To access SCOPUS, select it from the list of databases provided by the Research Medical Library: http://www3.mdanderson.org/library/databases/databases.html

To learn more about SCOPUS Affiliation Search, watch the tutorial: http://help.scopus.com/robo/projects/schelp/tutorials/sc_AffilSearch.html

For questions about SCOPUS or other databases, please contact the Research Medical Library Information Desk at RML-Help@mdanderson.org or 713-792-2282.