What research tool should I use?

The following are tools available for finding or calculating cancer statistics. Determine which is best for you based on:

Your statistic of interest,
Whether you want to use your own data, or data distributed by SEER or other agencies, and
Whether this is a one-time query, or whether you are willing to learn a new software package to achieve your goals.

Interactive Web Sites for Finding Statistics

The following Web-based systems provide access to statistical tables, graphs, and maps from various data sources. These systems cannot be used on data at your research institution.

Cancer Stat Fact Sheets are a collection of statistical summaries for a number of common cancer types. They were developed to provide a quick overview of frequently-requested cancer statistics including incidence, mortality, survival, stage, prevalence, and lifetime risk.
The SEER Cancer Statistics Review (CSR), 1975-2006 includes tables showing cancer statistics by race, sex, age, and year of diagnosis for the major cancer sites and for all cancers combined. Use the search engine to select statistics for specific cancer sites and racial/ethnic groups. From a list of pages that meet your criteria, you can view individual pages or merge pages into one custom-built PDF.
Fast Stats links to tables, charts, and graphs of cancer statistics for all major cancer sites by age, sex, race, time period. The statistics include incidence, mortality, survival and stage, prevalence, and the probability of developing or dying from cancer. A large set of statistics is available in pre-defined formats.
State Cancer Profiles is a comprehensive system of dynamic maps and graphs enabling the investigation of cancer trends at the national, state, and county level.
Cancer Query Systems provide more flexibility and a larger set of cancer statistics than Fast Stats but require more input from the user. A larger number of cancer sites are available, and you have the ability to customize the format of the output into tables, graphs, and delimited format.
Cancer Mortality Maps and Graphs shows geographic patterns and time trends of cancer death rates for the time period 1950-1994 for more than 40 cancers.
CINA+ Online is an interactive, online query system provided by the North American Association of Central Cancer Registries. This system allows you to access cancer incidence information by year, geography, sex, race, cancer type, and age and by any combination of these variables.

PC Software to Calculate Statistics from SEER and Other Data Sources

The following software packages provide the greatest flexibility for cancer researchers, but are more complex than the Web-based systems listed above. These applications can be used to analyze SEER databases as well as data collected at your research institution.

SEER*Stat statistical software can be used to view individual cancer records or calculate incidence, mortality, survival, and prevalence statistics from SEER and other cancer-related databases. All variables in the SEER Data are available for analysis. Statistics calculated in SEER*Stat can be viewed, printed, or exported for further analysis using other statistical software, including those described below.
Joinpoint is statistical software for the analysis of trends using models with several different lines that are connected at the "joinpoints." The software takes trend data (e.g., cancer rates) and fits the simplest joinpoint model that the data allow. Joinpoint is often used to analyze trends in rates calculated by SEER*Stat.
DevCan software uses lifetable methods to compute the lifetime and age-conditioned probability of developing cancer and dying of cancer in the general population. Input data for the computations include cancer incidence and mortality rates as well as all-cause mortality rates. Data sets are supplied to estimate risks of developing and dying of cancer for over 20 cancer sites by race and sex. In addition, DevCan can be used to calculate the lifetime risk using rates calculated in SEER*Stat and exported for use in DevCan.
CanSurv is statistical software to analyze population-based survival data. For grouped survival data, it can fit both the standard survival models and the mixture cure survival models and provides various graphs for model diagnosis. It can also fit parametric (cure) survival models to individually-listed data. CanSurv uses population-based survival data extracted from SEER*Stat survival sessions.
ComPrev software calculates complete prevalence estimates, based on limited-duration prevalence statistics calculated on SEER cancer data.
ProjPrev software combines populations and prevalence proportions to obtain/project new prevalence proportions. This software is useful to obtain US prevalence proportions for all races combined from race-specific SEER prevalence proportions and race-specific US populations.