The dynamics and social organization of innovation in the field of oncology/Conference abstracts

Conference abstracts from the major oncology conferences dating back to the 70's will provide us insight into the content of research being done before the publication filter.

American Society for Clinical Oncology (ASCO)
ASCO meetings are annual.

Abstracts from 2004 onwards are available online. We seem to have contacted ASCO requesting the previous ones.

Available abstracts seem to be online gratis, though they don't display a proper open-access license.

XXXX-2003: A note on the Meeting Library says "For assistance locating all other abstracts, email AbstractsArchive@asco.org."

2004 onwards: Journal of Clinical Oncology, as standardized html pages:


 * 2004
 * 2005
 * 2006
 * 2007
 * 2008

2015 onwards also available on Meeting Library as standardized html.

Finally, James was able to get a database with abstracts from 1995 to 2017, in exchange for digitizing and parsing the previous ones.

The abstracts for the 2018 edition have already been published, but for now there's no update to the database from ASCO.

The abstracts previous to 1995 have been digitized by the team in Chicago, and split between header and text.

This is the main corpus we've been currently working on.

Information on affiliations
Present in the data as Institutions: [2011, 2017]

Present in the data within AuthorsString: [2001, 2004], [2009, 2017]

Downloaded from JCO online archives: [2005, 2008]

Thus absent: [1995, 2000]

Note: CrossRef has metadata on JCO, but supplements with affiliations are only available for some years such as [2005]

European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO)
ESMO meetings are biennial, unlike ASCO meetings.

WebOfScience has info on the meetings from 1998 onwards but not the text of the abstracts.

ESMO's online history at Oxford University Press contains files for many years, though the formats vary greatly and are for the most part terrible to work with.:


 * 2014 (39)
 * 2012 (37)
 * 2010 (35)
 * 2008 (33)
 * 2006 (31)
 * 2004 (29)
 * 2002 (27)
 * 2000 (25)
 * 1998 (23)
 * 1996 (21)
 * 1994 (19, not available online, read below)
 * 1992 (17)
 * 1990 (15)

We found the volume and issue to the missing 1994 conference and located a library from where we have borrowed and scanned a physical copy.

We have developed Esmominer, an instrument to download and process all of them, including OCRing where necessary. The configuration files for this tool provide further details on the conditions of the data for each year.

We might want to check for all years whether whether the content at OUP contains what is on the ESMO website.

San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium (SABCS)
Another very important cancer meeting (confined to breast cancer, however, although it has about 10,000  participants form 90 countries) is the SABCS meeting (established in 1977): San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium; this is really considered  a major  meeting.

On their website there are links for the abstracts covering 2012 to 2015, go to the following website ad scroll down a little bit:

https://www.sabcs.org/Past-Meetings

The abstracts are both downloadable directly as a large PDF file … or also accessed as supplements of the journal Cancer Research (and they are apparently copyrighted by Springer?); we should check to see whether previous years are also posted as supplements of that journal: I had a quick look and it doesn’t look so, but we should do a further check IF we decide that the SABCS abstracts are worth exploring.