Cancer Research Citation Search Tips

Overview

The Cancer Research Citation Search tool allows you to search for scientific articles authored or coauthored by researchers from CDC's Division of Cancer Prevention and Control (DCPC) starting in 2000.

The articles themselves are not stored in the search tool. Citation titles are linked to the National Institutes of Health's PubMed database or PubMed Central archive, or CDC's journals Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) and Preventing Chronic Disease. If available, a digital object identifier (DOI) link is also provided.

Selecting the search criteria

If you leave all fields empty and click Search, you will retrieve the entire list of articles.

Keywords

Use the Keywords field to search for specific words in the title of the article.

Match any word

Select Match any word to retrieve articles that contain any of the words in the Keywords field in the article title. For example, if you type "prostate cancer" in the Keywords field using this option, you will retrieve all articles containing either "prostate" or "cancer" in the title (which would be most of the articles).

Exact match

Select Exact match to retrieve articles that contain the exact phrase in the Keywords field in the article title. For example, if you type "prostate cancer" in the Keywords field using this option, you will retrieve all articles containing the phrase "prostate cancer" in the title, but not articles containing "cancer of the prostate" in the title.

Match all words

Select Match all words to retrieve articles that contain all of the words in the Keywords field in the article title. For example, if you type "prostate cancer" in the Keyword field using this option, you will retrieve all articles containing both "prostate" and "cancer" in the title.

Author last name

Use the Author last name field to search for articles by a particular author. Note that since many articles are collaborations between researchers from DCPC and other institutions, the author may not be a DCPC researcher.

DCPC first authors

Check the DCPC first authors checkbox to retrieve only articles that were first-authored by a DCPC researcher.

Topic

Each article is assigned to one or more topics manually when the citation is entered. To retrieve articles that have been assigned to one or more topics, click the checkboxes corresponding to the topics you want.

If you select multiple topics, you will retrieve a list of articles that have been assigned to all of the topics you selected. If an article doesn't fit in any topic, it is assigned to the Other Research topic.

Journal name

Use the Journal name field to search for articles that were published in a particular journal.

Publication/calendar year between

Use these two fields to select a beginning and ending calendar year of publication. For example:

• If you want to retrieve articles that were published between 2021 and 2024, select 2021 from the first dropdown list and 2024 from the second dropdown list.
• If you want to retrieve articles published during one year, select that year from both dropdown lists. For example, if you select 2024 from both dropdown lists, you will retrieve articles published in 2024.

Fiscal year between

Use these two fields to select a beginning and ending fiscal year of publication. CDC's fiscal years begin October 1 and end September 30. For example, fiscal year 2024 began October 1, 2023 and ends September 30, 2024. See the instructions for Publication/calendar year between for more information.

Note that you can include either calendar years or fiscal years in your search criteria, but not both.

When you have entered all of your search criteria, click the Search button. The list of results appears.

Viewing the search results

Sorting the search results

When you have retrieved your results, the default sort order is ascending alphabetical (A to Z, 1 to 9) by article title. You can sort the results in different ways by clicking on the column titles. To sort the column in descending order (Z to A, 9 to 1), click the down arrow in the column title.

Please note that if you choose to sort the list by the Author column, the list is sorted alphabetically by the first author.

Setting the number of search results to view per page

By default, 25 results are shown on each page of the list. To increase the number of results to show on each page, select the desired number from the Show citations dropdown list at the top or bottom of the page.

Accessing and reading an article

To read an article in the search results list:

• Click on the article title. A new browser window will open and show either the abstract of the article (if available) in PubMed, or the full text of the article in PubMed Central, MMWR, or Preventing Chronic Disease. The PubMed abstract will include links (if available) to the full text of the article; however, many journals charge a fee to access the full text.
• Click on the DOI (if available). A new browser window will open and show the article in a journal.