New Clinical Advisory Issued

[Editor's Note: The National Cancer Institute (NCI) classified this announcement as an advisory not an alert.]

The National Cancer Institute (NCI) has issued a new Clinical Advisory on January 4, 2006:

• NCI Issues Clinical Announcement for Preferred Method of Treatment for Advanced Ovarian Cancer

The National Cancer Institute (NCI), part of the National Institutes of Health, today issued an announcement encouraging treatment with anticancer drugs via two methods, after surgery, for women with advanced ovarian cancer. The combined methods, which deliver drugs into a vein and directly into the abdomen, extend overall survival for women with advanced ovarian cancer by about a year.

The clinical announcement to surgeons and other medical professionals who treat women with ovarian cancer was made with the support of six professional societies and advocacy groups. The announcement coincides with publication in the New England Journal of Medicine* of the results of a large clinical trial by Deborah Armstrong, M.D., medical oncologist and an associate professor at Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center in Baltimore, Md., and her colleagues in an NCI-supported research network known as the Gynecologic Oncology Group (GOG). This is the eighth trial evaluating the use of chemotherapy delivered into the abdomen for ovarian cancer. Together, these trials show a significant improvement in survival for women with advanced ovarian cancer.

Links to Clinical Alerts/Advisories can also be found from these NLM Web sites:

• MedlinePlus features Clinical Alerts/Advisories as NIH Press Releases on the appropriate Health Topics page(s).
• As before, PubMed and the NLM Gateway have a link to the Clinical Alerts on their side bars. In addition, a featured link will now be available from their homepage for ten days after a new alert/advisory is issued.

*Armstrong DK, Bundy B, Wenzel L, Huang HQ, Baergen R, Lele S, Copeland LJ, Walker JL, Burger RA. Intraperitoneal cisplatin and paclitaxel in ovarian cancer. N Engl J Med. 2006 Jan 5;354(1):34-43. [Editor's Note: This citation is now available in PubMed (PMID: 16394300).]

PubMed®: Sweet 16

On December 29, 2005, the number of citations in PubMed surpassed 16 million.

Environmental Health Concerns on the Farm: The Newest Neighborhood for Tox Town

[Editor's Note: This Technical Note is a reprint of an announcement published on NLM-Tox-Enviro-Health-L, an e-mail announcement list available from the NLM Division of Specialized Information Services. To subscribe to this list, please see the NLM-TOX-ENVIRO-HEALTH-L Join, Leave, or Change Options page.]

A Farm neighborhood is the newest addition to Tox Town, a Web-based introduction to environmental health risks and toxic chemicals. Tox Town, invites visitors to explore a farm to learn about environmental health issues related to agricultural waste, drinking water quality, air pollution, pests, and farm animals. Farms share many of the same environmental health concerns found anywhere in the US, but they also have unique concerns and issues, such as exposure to hazardous agricultural chemicals and toxic gases from animal waste.

New locations to explore on the Farm are farm buildings, feeding operations, landfills, agricultural runoff, farm animals, farm ponds, meat processing, tree farming and logging, off-road vehicles, and nearby urban sprawl. Farming is one of the most hazardous occupations in the US. Because farm families usually live where they work, all family members are at increased risk of farm-related injury and illness.

Tox Town uses neighborhood scenes, the Farm, City, Town, and US-Mexico Border, along with color, graphics, sounds and animation to add interest to learning about connections between chemicals, the environment and the public's health. Tox Town's target audience is high school, college, and graduate students, educators, and the interested public.

Tox Town is a project of the Specialized Information Services Division of the National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health. Please send your comments or questions about Tox Town to tehip@teh.nlm.nih.gov.

New Clinical Alert Issued by National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID)

The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), issued a new Clinical Alert on January 18, 2006:

• International HIV/AIDS Trial Finds Continuous Antiretroviral Therapy Superior to Episodic Therapy

The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), announced that enrollment into a large international HIV/AIDS trial comparing continuous antiretroviral therapy with episodic drug treatment guided by levels of CD4+ cells has been stopped. Enrollment was stopped because those patients receiving episodic therapy had twice the risk of disease progression (the development of clinical AIDS or death), the major outcome of the study.

NIAID made the decision to halt enrollment in collaboration with the study's Executive Committee and following a recommendation received from an independent Data and Safety Monitoring Board (DSMB). The DSMB, charged with regularly evaluating data and safety issues during the multi-year trial, conducted a review of the interim study data in early January.

Links to Clinical Alerts/Advisories can also be found from these NLM Web sites:

• MedlinePlus features Clinical Alerts/Advisories as NIH Press Releases on the appropriate Health Topics page(s).
• As before, PubMed and the NLM Gateway have a link to the Clinical Alerts on their side bars. In addition, a featured link will now be available from their homepage for ten days after a new alert/advisory is issued.

MeSH® Video Available on the Web

Branching Out: The MeSH® Vocabulary is a 12-minute video introduction to the development, structure and use of the MeSH vocabulary. This video's target audience is searchers of MEDLINE®/PubMed®, and it is used in the PubMed classes offered by NLM and the National Training Center and Clearinghouse. The video is available on the NLM Web site with other NLM Distance Education Program Resources, and is offered in Macromedia Flash®, Apple QuickTime®, and Windows Media® formats.

New Status Tag for PubMed® Citations

[Editor's Note: This feature was implemented in PubMed on February 6, 2006.]

Author manuscripts for published articles were added to PubMed Central® (PMC), NIH digital archive of life sciences journal literature, beginning in July 2005 (see article: PubMed® Links to Author Manuscripts in PMC®. NLM Tech Bull. 2005 Jul-Aug;(345):e3.).

A new status tag, [PubMed - author manuscript in PMC], will appear on PubMed citations for articles that would not normally be cited in PubMed because they are from journals that are a) not indexed for MEDLINE or b) do not participate in PMC. This small number of citations can be retrieved using the search: pubstatusnihms. As these citations are processed, the status tag will change as appropriate, with a final designation of [PubMed]. To retrieve all citations in PubMed for which author manuscripts are available in PMC, use the search: author manuscript [sb].

Smallpox Added to PubMed® Special Queries

The National Library of Medicine® (NLM) Special Queries resource page (available from PubMed's blue sidebar) now includes a subject page for smallpox. This page provides a comprehensive PubMed search and links to other sources of smallpox information. The search of PubMed/MEDLINE® retrieves citations to published literature on smallpox and related disorders and vaccines.

NLM staff consulted with National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) research staff and developed this pre-formulated search strategy to assist clinicians, public health specialists, information specialists, researchers, and the general public to find information on the diagnosis, prevention, and treatment of smallpox. To retrieve the search results of over 20,000 PubMed citations and view the search strategy used see PubMed/MEDLINE Search and Smallpox Information Resources.

Additional linked smallpox information resources include free full text access to Chapter 6, Smallpox and Vaccinia. Henderson, D.A; Moss, B. From: Vaccines. 3rd ed. Plotkin, Stanley A; Orenstein, Walter A., editors. Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders Company; c1999 through the NLM/NCBI (National Center for Biotechnology Information) Bookshelf. Other smallpox information resources links are: NLM MedlinePlus.gov, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).

For more information on the Special Queries Resource in PubMed see New Special Queries Resource in PubMed®. NLM TechBull. 2005 Mar-Apr; (343):e1. For more information on the National Library of Medicine initiative on Smallpox Preparedness see Smallpox Preparedness. NLM Tech Bull. 2001 Nov-Dec; (323):e8.

NLM® and NASA Collaborative Arrangement for Space Life Sciences Data Ceases

In October 2005 the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) notified NLM that it was ending the collaborative arrangement it has had with NLM since 1993 when the two groups worked together on the creation of the SPACELINE® database. This decision is the result of NASA budget cuts and reallocation of project priorities.

Once NASA completes in process work, it will no longer contribute records to MEDLINE® and LocatorPlus. However, NLM will continue its policy to add appropriate citations to the PubMed Space subset. These NLM created records will not have the added NASA fields for Investigator, Other ID, Other Terms, Space Flight Mission, and General Notes. Existing Space Life Sciences data will remain in MEDLINE and LocatorPlus. The ability to search PubMed and the NLM Gateway using the Space subset will also remain.

NLM Gateway Enhances Search and Display of Meeting Abstracts

Over 98% of the Meeting Abstracts in the NLM Gateway now include the conference name in the record. All of the meeting abstracts from a particular conference can be retrieved by searching the conference name. Use the new field qualifier [CN] (which will also search the Corporate Author in Meeting Abstracts, PubMed, and NLM Catalog). For more information, see the Gateway FAQ: How do I search for abstracts from a particular professional conference?.

In addition, Meeting Abstracts search results are now retrieved from standardized XML data. This allows additional fields to be displayed, as well as the display of diacritics. In the conversion to standardized XML output, some fields were converted to other existing fields while some were dropped. For a list of current fields, see Display Formats Data Elements by Collection for Meeting Abstracts in the Gateway's Help.

Added Security During My NCBI Registration

An additional step will be added to the My NCBI registration process in order to prevent automated programs from setting up accounts. On the registration screen, five characters will be displayed as an image and registrants will be asked to type the five characters into a text box.

PubMed® Subject Subset Strategies Updated

All PubMed subject subset strategies are reviewed at least once a year to check for possible revisions due to MeSH vocabulary changes, to add or delete terms, or to modify parts of the strategies. The following subset strategies were recently revised: Bioethics, Cancer, Complementary Medicine, Space Life Sciences, Toxicology. The Systematic Reviews subset was revised in December 2005.

Search Tag [ab] Discontinued in PubMed®

[Editor's Note: This search tag was discontinued in PubMed on February 28, 2006.]

Although not documented, the [ab] search tag is an alias for a Text Word search. There is no "abstract only" search option in PubMed®. To prevent confusion, we will soon discontinue supporting the [ab] search tag in PubMed searches. To search titles and abstracts (plus additional fields), use [tw] or [text word]. To search only the Title and Abstract fields, use [tiab] or [title/abstract]. Please see the PubMed Help Search Field Descriptions and Tags for information about search tags. Users are reminded that terms entered without search tags will be searched in appropriate fields based on PubMed's Automatic Term Mapping feature.

New Animated Tutorials Available on the LinkOut for Libraries Web page

Two new animated tutorials are now available on the LinkOut for Libraries Web page. These brief, narrated demonstrations in Flash® format are on the following topics:

• Displaying Icons Using a Special URL
• Implementing OpenURL-based Services in PubMed

All tutorials are available under the Tutorials menu on the LinkOut for Libraries Web page as well as the Distance Education Program Resources page. The tutorials require Macromedia Flash® Player to view and were created using Quarbon's ViewletBuilder®.

Please direct questions or comments to lib-linkout@ncbi.nlm.nih.gov.