Food Science / RefWorks -- Curcumin & Prostate Cancer

1. Refworks
2. Develop Search Terminology
3. Comparison of Retrievals from Several Databases
4. Resources for Plant Medicinal Research at the University of Illinois
5. Shared RefWorks Databases
6. Keep Up-to-date with Autoalerts

I. UIUC RefWorks Support Site
Find here:

• Log in to RefWorks
• RefWorks Slim Sheet
• Instructions for exporting from various databases into Refworks

II. Develop Search Terminology

Keep looking for new terms as you perform your search in the various resources. Reiterate the search.

Curcumin --

• Use MeSH database, a part of PubMed to find alternative words / phrases :
  • Searched for Curcumin:
    "A yellow-orange dye obtained from tumeric, the powdered root of CURCUMA longa. It is used in the preparation of curcuma paper and the detection of boron. Curcumin appears to possess a spectrum of pharmacological properties, due primarily to its inhibitory effects on metabolic enzymes."
    Other terms:
    
    • Diferuloylmethane
    • Turmeric Yellow
    • Yellow, Turmeric
    • demethoxycurcumin
    • bis(4-hydroxycinnamoyl)methane
      

    All MeSH Categories

    Chemicals and Drugs Category --> Organic Chemicals --> Hydrocarbons --> Hydrocarbons, Acyclic --> Alkanes --> Heptanes --> Diarylheptanoids --> Curcumin
    . . . so may want to search for diarylheptanoids, as a broader term.

  • Searched for turmeric in the MeSH database :
    Mapped to Curcuma (genus; family is ZINGIBERACEAE); also Curcuma longa; Tumeric;Turmeric; Curcuma zedoaria; Zedoary zedoaria; turmeric extract; turmerin; ukonan A; ukonan C; ar-turmerone; 1,7-bis(4-hydroxy-3-methoxyphenyl)-1,4,6-heptatrien-3-one; 1,7-bis(4-hydroxyphenyl)-1-heptene-3,5-dione; purnark; P54FP cpd; antarth; and others!
    Other vocabulary noticed: curcuminoids; haldi (Hindi name for turmeric)
• Searched EmTree, a part of Embase, for turmeric and for curcumin.
  "Or" both of these terms.
• Searched Mosby's Handbook of Herbs & Natural Supplements for turmeric:
  • Other common names: Curcuma, Indian saffron, Indian valerian, jiang huang, kyoo, radix, red valerian, tumeric, ukon
  • Also lists drug interactions, side effects, contraindications, dosages, reported uses, etc.
• Dr. Duke's Phytochemical and Ethnobotanical Databases - Chemicals in Curcuma longa - a long list!
• Environmental Chemistry.com:
  • Synonyms for cucurmin:

    (1E,4Z,6E)-5-hydroxy-1,7-bis(4-hydroxy-3-methoxyphenyl) hepta-1,4,6-trien-3-one; (1E,6E)-1,7-Bis(4-hydroxy-3-methoxyphenyl) hepta-1,6-diene-3,5-dione; 1, 6-Heptadiene-3,5-dione, 1,7-bis (4-hydroxy-3-methoxyphenyl)-; 1,6-Heptadiene-3,5-dione, 1,7-bis(4-hydroxy-3-methoxyphenyl)-; 1,6-Heptadiene-3,5-dione, 1,7-bis(4-hydroxy-3-methoxyphenyl)-, (1E,6E)-; 1,6-Heptadiene-3,5-dione, 1,7-bis(4-hydroxy-3-methoxyphenyl)-, (E,E)-; 1,7-Bis(4-hydroxy-3-methoxyphenyl) hepta-1,6-diene-3,5-dione; 1,7-Bis(4-hydroxy-3-methoxyphenyl)-1,6-heptadiene-3,5-dione; 1,9-Bis(4-hydroxy-3-methoxyphenyl)-2,7-nonadiene-4,6-dione; 2,7-Nonadiene-4,6-dione, 1,9-bis(4-hydroxy-3-methoxyphenyl)-; Bio1_000405; Bio1_000894; Bio1_001383; C10443; CI 75300; CI Natural Yellow 3; Cucurmin; Curcuma; Curcumin; Curcumin I; Curcumin; 1,7-Bis(4-hydroxy-3-methoxyphenyl)-1,6-heptadiene-3,5-dione; Diferaloylmethane; Diferuloylmethane; E 100; Gelbwurz; Golden seal; Haidr; Halad; Haldar; Halud; Hydrastis; Indian saffron; Indian turmeric; K00009; Kacha haldi; Kurkumin [Czech]; Merita earth; MLS000069631; Natural yellow 3; NCI60_002883; NCIMech_000700; Orange Root; Safran d'Inde; SDCCGMLS-0066836.P001; SMR000058237; Souchet; Terra Merita; Tumeric yellow; Turmeric; Turmeric (>98% curcurmin) ; Turmeric oleoresin (79%-85% curcumin) ; Turmeric yellow; Yellow Ginger; Yellow puccoon; Yellow Root; Yo-Kin; Zlut prirodni 3 [Czech]; CAS Number for cucurmin is 458-37-7

• SciFinder Scholar - Use to find articles in Chemical Abstracts, but also to find synonyms:
  1,6-Heptadiene-3,5-dione, 1,7-bis(4-hydroxy-3-methoxyphenyl)-, (E,E)- (8CI); Curcumin (6CI); (E,E)-1,7-Bis(4-hydroxy-3-methoxyphenyl)-1,6-heptadiene-3,5-dione; C Yellow 15; C.I. 75300; C.I. Natural Yellow 3; Curcuma; Curcumin I; Curcumine; Diferuloylmethane; E 100; E 100 (dye); Haidr; Halad; Haldar; Halud; Indian Saffron; Kacha Haldi; Merita Earth; NSC 32982; Natural Yellow 3; San-Ei Curcumine AL; San-Ei Gen Curcumine AL; Souchet; Terra Merita; Turmeric; Turmeric (dye); Turmeric yellow; Ukon; Ukon (dye); Yellow Ginger; Yellow Root; Yo-Kin; trans,trans-Curcumin; CAS Number for cucurmin is 458-37-7

Prostate Cancer --

• MeSH terms from PubMed: Prostatic Neoplasms, Used For: Prostate Cancer(s); Prostatic Cancer; Cancer of the Prostate.
  Might also want to search for articles that mention the PSA test (Prostate Specfic Antigen). Other related terms: Prostatic Hyperplasia; Prostatic Intraepithelial Neoplasia; prostate adenocarcinoma; etc.

III. Comparison of retrievals in Several Databases

Summary for search for articles on the effects of curcumin or turmeric on prostate cancer:

PubMed Search, (1950s-present): 62 hits

Searched:
(Prostate cancer OR prostatic neoplasm* OR (prostate and (cancer* or neoplasm*)) OR prostate specific antigen OR (prostate and PSA)) AND (Curcumin OR curcuma OR cucurma OR cucumin OR curcuminoid OR tumeric OR turmeric OR tumerin OR turmerin OR demethoxycurcumin OR diferuloylmethane)

CAB Abstracts Search, (1910-present): 22 hits

Searched:
("Prostate cancer" OR "prostatic neoplasm*" OR (prostate and (cancer* or neoplasm*)) OR "prostate specific antigen" OR (prostate and PSA)) AND (Curcumin OR curcuma OR cucurma OR cucumin OR curcuminoid OR tumeric OR turmeric OR tumerin OR turmerin OR demethoxycurcumin OR diferuloylmethane)

Note: Use "general search" mode, and formulate search in the Topic search box. Surround phrases in quotation marks.

Web of Science Search, (1970-present): 90 hits

Searched:
("Prostate cancer" OR "prostatic neoplasm*" OR (prostate and (cancer* or neoplasm*)) OR "prostate specific antigen" OR (prostate and PSA)) AND (Curcumin OR curcuma OR cucurma OR cucumin OR curcuminoid OR tumeric OR turmeric OR tumerin OR turmerin OR demethoxycurcumin OR diferuloylmethane)

Note: Use "general search" mode, and formulate search in the Topic search box. Surround phrases in quotation marks.

Biological Abstracts Search, (1969-present): 44 hits

Searched:
("Prostate cancer" OR "prostatic neoplasm*" OR (prostate and (cancer* or neoplasm*)) OR "prostate specific antigen" OR (prostate and PSA)) AND (Curcumin OR curcuma OR cucurma OR cucumin OR curcuminoid OR tumeric OR turmeric OR tumerin OR turmerin OR demethoxycurcumin OR diferuloylmethane)

Note: Use "general search" mode, and formulate search in the Topic search box. Surround phrases in quotation marks.

Food Science & Technology Abstracts (FSTA) Search, (1969-present): 5 hits

Searched:
("Prostate cancer" OR "prostatic neoplasm*" OR (prostate and (cancer* or neoplasm*)) OR "prostate specific antigen" OR (prostate and PSA)) AND (Curcumin OR curcuma OR cucurma OR cucumin OR curcuminoid OR tumeric OR turmeric OR tumerin OR turmerin OR demethoxycurcumin OR diferuloylmethane)

Note: Use "general search" mode, and formulate search in the Topic search box. Surround phrases in quotation marks.

SciFinder Scholar (Chemical Abstracts) Search, (1907-present): 114 hits

Searched:
The effect of turmeric or curcumin on prostate cancer

Notes:

• SciFinder Scholar uses a natural language searching mode, so formulate your search in a simple sentence. Behind the scene, term matching will occur!
• When searching SciFinder Scholar, the default is to search CA and Medline [PubMed] simultaneously. There is an option later to de-duplicate the references; or you may choose to only search Chemical Abstracts.
• Before you start, check the Preferences / Save As / References to make sure you will be saving in the Summary (default) or Full format.
• To search, click on: New Search / Explore / Research Topic.
• For this search, where I was searching CA and Medline simultaneously, the following retrieval options were provided after I ran my search. I chose #2:
  1. 49 references were found containing the concept "prostate cancer", and either the concept "turmeric" or the concept "curcumin". The concepts found were closely associated with one another.
  2. 160 references were found containing the concept "prostate cancer", and either the concept "curcumin" or the concept "turmeric". The concepts found were present anywhere (perhaps widely separated) within the reference.
  3. 76 references were found containing the two concepts "curcumin" and "prostate cancer" closely associated with one another.
  4. 156 references were found where the two concepts "curcumin" and "prostate cancer" were present anywhere in the reference.
  5. 26 references were found containing the two concepts "turmeric" and "prostate cancer" closely associated with one another.
  6. 121 references were found where the two concepts "turmeric" and "prostate cancer" were present anywhere in the reference.
  7. 6624 references were found containing either the concept "curcumin" or the concept "turmeric".
  8. 5644 references were found containing the concept "curcumin".
  9. 5259 references were found containing the concept "turmeric".
  10. 99562 references were found containing the concept "prostate cancer".
• When I de-duplicated the 160 references, I was left with 114 citations. Of these, 13 were only from Medline, so CA duplicates Medline a lot, but also has a significant number of additional references.
• SciFinder has several unique analysis tools. E.g. Of the 114 hits...
  • Analyze the 114 hits by author:
    Su Ching Yuan - 9; Lee Kuo Hsiung - 7; Shih Charles C Y - 7; Aggarwal Bharat B - 6; etc.
  • Analyze by Journal:
    PCT Int. Appl.- 23; U.S. Pat. Appl. Publ.- 12; Oncogene - 5; Bioorganic & Medicinal Chemistry - 3; Molecular Cancer Therapeutics - 3; Prostate - 3; Cancer Research - 2; Carcinogenesis - 2; Journal of Medicinal Chemistry - 2; Nutrition and Cancer- 2; Prostate Cancer and Prostatic Diseases - 2, etc.
  • Analyze by organization:
    University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill - 5; Emory University - 4; Henry Ford Health System - 4; Research Development Foundation - 4; National Cancer Institute - 3; New Chapter Inc - 3; Rutgers University - 3; etc.
  • Analyze by year of publication:
    2007 - 1; 2006 - 30; 2005 - 25; 2004 - 14; 2003 - 19; 2002 - 11; 2001 - 5; 2000 - 4; 1999 -3 ; 1998 - 0; 1997 - 1; 1996 - 0; 1995 -1 .

Google Scholar Search, 1326-1900 hits, but over half may so incomplete as to be useless, and others are duplicates (??)

Searched:
prostate Curcumin | curcuma | cucurma | cucumin | curcuminoid | tumeric | turmeric | tumerin | turmerin | demethoxycurcumin | diferuloylmethane
(which translates to searching the full text for prostate PLUS any one of the curcumin terms)

1900 apparent hits, but when I downloaded them into Zotero (for later export to RefWorks) only 1326 downloaded). Furthermore, many were based on cited references appearing at the end of articles rather than citations to articles themselves.

Note: Google Scholar does not search behind the firewalls of Elsevier (the publisher of nearly 2000 Sci-tech journals) or the American Chemical Society.

To import these into RefWorks, see the instructions. You will want to install the Zotero plugin for the Firefox web browser if you want to download more than one citation from Google Scholar at at time.

IV. Resources for Plant Medicinal Research at the University of Illinois
A website that lists in one place many of the resources at UIUC folks doing plant medicinal research will find useful. Other resource to try include:

• Search the Grants-awarded databases
• CRISP -- to find biomedical grants awarded. Here's a sample search result for grants that were looking at the effects of turmeric or curcumin (1/31/07).
• NSF Grants Search -- to find grants awarded by the NSF
• Google Scholar -- combine this with Zotero, and download basic citations into RefWorks (not including abstracts). Follow this link to discover how to import citations from Google Scholar into RefWorks
• Dissertation Abstracts
• WorldCat -- to find if any books have been published on this topic
• AGRIS -- to find research published in developing countries as well as developed countries (note: CAB Abstracts is a much larger ag database)
• Agricola -- to find agricultural research published by the USDA and others in the US. (note: CAB Abstracts is a much larger ag database)

V. Shared RefWorks databases

You may export these citations into your own RefWorks account!

• Curcumin / Prostate cancer references
  from PubMed, Embase, CAB Abstracts, Biological Abstracts, Web of Science, FSTA, Scifinder Scholar, 1/31/07.
• Curcumin / Prostate cancer references
  from Google Scholar, using Zotero to help import multiple citations, 1/31/07.
• Curcumin / Prostate cancer references that were uniquely in either SciFinder Scholar or Embase (or PubMed)
  Of the 114 +114=228 references that wer in SciFinder Scholar or Embase, 86 of them were only in one or the other database! And the split was roughly even between them -- that is about 40 would have been missed if I'd just searched Embase and not SciFinder Scholar, and vice versa! (Keep in mind that both of these resources are also searching PubMed, too.) [Note: In March, 2008, we cancelled our subsciption to EmBase. However, the articles in Embase are all available in a more comprehensive database, Scopus.]

VI. Keep up to Date! Set up Auto-alerts

Have your searches run in a database automatically, whenever the database is updated, and the results sent to you via e-mail!   Use auto-alerts to keep up-to-date on the research in a particular area, keep track of your colleagues’ research, or to receive the table of contents of selected publications.  (Note: these instructions are also in the Biotech FAQ, pg. 3.)

Auto-alerts from Web of Science. 

First, you must "register":

• To register, from the first Web of Science page, click on the link to "sign in or register"
• Now click on the "Register” link.
• Enter your email address and a password of your choosing.
• You are now registered and can save searches and set up alerts from Web of Science.

After you have logged in, you're ready to set up an alert:

• Go to the main Web of Science page, http://www.library.uiuc.edu/orr/get.php?instid=258127 .
• Create a search strategy using either the “Quick Search” or the “General Search” option.  Run your search.
• Click on "Search History" [If you haven't already logged in, you'll be prompted to do so at this time.]
• If you've created several searches, the auto-alert will only be run against your most recently created search (the one on the top of the Search History).  So you may need to re-type an earlier search to force it to the top.
• Click on "Save History".  Give your search a name, a description, and check the box, "Send me e-mail alerts".
• Select an email format -- I'd recommend HTML, if your email program supports this, since this format will include links back to the Web of Science database, so you can take advantage of the various links available within the database.
• Select frequency - I'd recommend weekly, since that's how often the database is updated.
• Click on the "Save” button.
• Now, each week, you'll receive an email the with new results of your search, with embedded links back into the Web of Science database
• You may create as many alerts as you need.

Auto-alerts from PubMed, GenBank, or other NCBI resources.   

Recently it became possible to set up auto-alerts to run against the NCBI resources such as GenBank and PubMed.  PubMed is most likely the one you’ll want to use to set up an alert, so you’ll be notified of new articles in your subject area, or written by particular scientists.

First, you must “register” :

• To register, from the main PubMed page, http://www.library.uiuc.edu/orr/get.php?instid=406312
• Click on the link to “MyNCBI”
• Now click on the “register for an account” link and provide the information requested (choose a login name and password, provide your email address, and choose a security question).

After you have logged in, you’re ready to set up an alert:

• From the main PubMed page, create a search, and then click on “Save Search”.
• Choose a name for the search, and elect to receive email updates.
• Fill in the rest of the information requested – I’d recommend receiving the alerts weekly, in HTML format if your email supports this.  I usually set the number of results to send to the maximum number.
• Now, each week, you'll receive an email the with new results of your search, with embedded links back into the PubMed  database
• You may create as many alerts as you need.

Publisher-based Auto-alerts. 

Several publishers and journals also allow you to set up “auto-alerts” for their journals, so you get the results as soon as the new issue of the journal is posted – much faster than the articles appear in indexes such as Current Contents, Web of Science, PubMed, etc.!  Among the most popular sites for this are:

• Highwire (http://highwire.stanford.edu/) –  several hundred mostly bio-med titles from scholarly societies, including Science, Journal of Biological Chemistry, PNAS, Agronomy J, JAMA, Plant Cell,  etc.
• ScienceDirect (http://www.sciencedirect.com/) – for journals published by Elsevier or Academic Press
• American Chemical Society (http://pubs.acs.org/journals/asap/) – for journals published by ACS.
• Nature (http://www.library.uiuc.edu/orr/get.php?instid=299585)
• Science (http://www.library.uiuc.edu/orr/get.php?instid=5114)