Where to find current research on stem cells and Parkinson's

September 3, 2013 7:45 AM

Want current research on stem cells as treatment for Parkinson's disease. Unreported experimentation, new discoveries, nascent research, the beginning formulations of theories and possible treatments.

I work at a library and got a question from a patron I can't answer. Maybe AskMeFi can help. Hope so.

He's looking for current research on stem cells as treatment for Parkinson's disease. He's not interested in what's out in the news sources or the readily available consumer magazines, etc. He's seen those and is up on the information in them. He's not interested in a google search. He wants access to papers on the cutting edge of research in this area. In other words, he wants to find out what scientists are doing right now in this area. Unreported experimentation, new discoveries, nascent research, the beginning formulations of theories and possible treatments.

I didn't know how to help him. I assume there are scientific journals in this area, but how does a person access them? I've also heard that many researchers now bypass the journal route and put their research up directly on the web for everyone to see immediately. But how does a person access those? How do you find them?

Is there a clearing house for research in this area? A clipping service, perhaps. I'm at a loss...

posted by MarioM to Science & Nature (5 answers total)

(Not a biologist, but I've worked at an institution in the field.)

I'd really, really strongly caution him against seeking out research that's skipped the peer-review process - this field, moreso than most, is FULL of hucksters and schemers trying to scam desperate people. I'm not saying that's him, but if he's looking for "unreported experimentation", as you put it, he's not going to find anything legitimate or fact-based.

The good news is there's plenty of exciting, scientifically legitimate work being done for him to read about. Here are some resources:

For journals, there's Cell Stem Cell. He might like to subscribe, or maybe your library can.

You will also definitely want to check out SCR. He can look at the archives of the Nature Reports Stem Cells page.

The International Society for Stem Cell Research sponsors enormous conferences in the field. Looking at the speakers and their talk titles will give him a good idea of what different researchers are pursuing at the moment. He can sign up for their e-newsletter, too, which can be an interesting overview of the field.

Some good academic centers to keep tabs on are the Stanford Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine, the Harvard Stem Cell Institute, and the Broad Center at UCSF, to name a few (memail me if you want more places that are specifically associated with institutions.)

Maybe you can help him set up RSS feeds for some of these different sites?
posted by superfluousm at 8:20 AM on September 3, 2013

The Michael J. Fox foundation funds a lot of PD research, and I think has summaries of all the projects they're funding. That'll give names of PD researchers. Plug that into Pubmed for abstracts (or use Pubmed to search), or try to find the papers directly on the researchers' websites, as mentioned. You can also e-mail them for reprints, but there's a high probability of your message getting lost, especially with clinician-researchers.
posted by supercres at 8:21 AM on September 3, 2013 [2 favorites]

Oh yeah, don't listen to anything that hasn't passed the peer review process (i.e., shown up in Pubmed; Google Scholar is bad about indexing papers that aren't in press yet).
posted by supercres at 8:22 AM on September 3, 2013

A pubmed search for stem cells and parkinson's disease will find you a lot of papers. Many of them will be freely available to the public (especially those greater than 6 months old,) and your patron should be able to get access to almost all of them through a local academic library (either in the stacks or at a terminal.) His best bet might be to read some recent review articles (here's a free one) and then track down the references in that article that are the most interesting to him.

If the patron wants to know what kind of research is being done right now and might be published in the next few years, a text search on NIH RePORTER can help him find out what NIH funded projects are underway.

I agree with superfluousm that any "research" being put on the web without peer review should be looked at with a very high degree of skepticism. Unless he has the expertise to evaluate it (and if that were true, he probably wouldn't be asking you this question, since he would already be regularly reading the primary literature) he should ignore that kind of stuff.
posted by juliapangolin at 8:43 AM on September 3, 2013 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Thanks everyone. Very helpful. One or more of these links should satisfy my patron.
posted by MarioM at 9:47 AM on September 3, 2013