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Tip #52: Searching for PMIDs in Other Databases

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What is a PMID? A PMID, also known as the PubMed Identifier, is a unique number assigned by the National Library of Medicine to all records included in PubMed. It appears under the citation information on each record. PMIDs do not change over time or during processing and are never reused. Searching for articles using their PMIDs can be a very efficient way to find known items or test searches (e.g., Testing for Article Inclusion in Ovid and Testing for Articles in PubMed ). To search for a set of known records in PubMed, enter a string of PMIDs in the search box without the Boolean "OR" and without the [pmid] field tag. If you use [pmid], you will need to use the Boolean "OR" to combine them. These three searches return the same results: 26104772 11038025 35106283 26104772 OR 11038025 OR 35106283 26104772[pmid] OR 11038025[pmid] OR 35106283[pmid] Below we will highlight some search tips for finding PMIDs across various databases Too long didn't read (tldr) c

Favorite Features & Sneaky Solutions: A Database Tips Lightning Round: View the recording!

On October 7, 2024, the Medical Library Association's User Experience (UX) Caucus held a database tips lightning round. Watch the entire event recording! MLA UX Caucus Database Tips Lightning Round * (October 2024)  View presenter slide decks, the full chat transcript, and a summary of Q&A and tips culled from the chat: Lightning Round documents  (October 2024) The presenters and their topics, with timestamps of when they appear in the video, were: Methodology and Publication Type Filters in EBSCOhost Databases (00:40) Marilia Antunez, MA (LIS), MA,  Life & Allied Health Sciences Librarian, Associate Professor, The University of Akron (OH) Tricky Truncation in ProQuest Databases (07:15) Jocelyn Boice, Associate Professor / Collection Strategies and Data Analysis Librarian, Colorado State University Libraries Embase Query Translator (12:52) Molly Higgins, Systematic Review Librarian, USDA NESR What’s Included in Emtree’s /syn and /br (19:20) Amy Nadell, MSLIS, MA , AHIP-D, L

Tip #51: MeSH Major Topics across PubMed and Ovid, with a bonus glimpse of changes to NLM indexing practices

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You might think that a recent publication indexed in PubMed with Epilepsy, Temporal Lobe* / pathology  would be retrieved by this query in Ovid MEDLINE :   *Epilepsy, Temporal Lobe / pa [Pathology]   You would be incorrect. One example is Xie K, Royer J, Larivière S, et al. Atypical connectome topography and signal flow in temporal lobe epilepsy. Prog Neurobiol. 2024;236:102604 . doi:10.1016/j.pneurobio.2024.102604.  and you can compare for yourself by searching for 38604584.ui in your preferred Ovid Medline segment, where it will show   This issue, of Major Topic MeSH-with-subheading not being accurately imported into Ovid, seems to affect literally every article since mid-2022 with a Heading/subheading combination marked as a Major Topic. What’s happening, and why? At the moment of intake processing, Ovid breaks apart headings consisting of a Major Topic and subheading.   NLM Data Ovid HIV Infections* / prevention & control

Tip #50: "Indexed Keywords" in Scopus: what they are, where they come from, and how (and whether) to exclude them

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Scopus is a very large multidisciplinary database with a wide range of sources. According to Elsevier, almost 99% of journals indexed in Embase and MEDLINE are included in Scopus. Unlike Embase, which uses the Emtree thesaurus for indexing (the full Emtree thesaurus is only available in Embase), or MEDLINE, which uses MeSH (accessible publicly via the MeSH Browser or MeSH Database ), Scopus does not have its own controlled vocabulary or thesaurus searching capabilities. So what are the "indexed keywords" in Scopus? And are they beneficial or harmful to your searches? The origins of "indexed keywords" Journal article records in Scopus are supplied directly from publishers, and thus arrive with no indexing. Scopus then enriches these references whenever possible, using thesauri Elsevier either owns or licenses. The “indexed keywords” that display in references are added when Scopus finds an exact item match with a reference from Embase or MEDLINE. For example, an ar

Tip #49 Command Line Syntax and Quotations in Embase on Ovid

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The Crux: when including the terms use, root, scope, or ptx (a protein) in a search query, you may need to apply quotation marks either around the term or around the phrase in which it appears. Many databases ignore or remove frequently occurring terms from search queries to expedite processing time. So called stopwords in Embase are and, as, for, from, is, of, that, the, this, to, was, and were . The stopword and is also a Boolean operator. If you use and in an advanced search, it will not be ignored but will act as an operator unless you enclose it in quotation marks, which will render it a stopword. Either way, your search should not result in a database error or baffling results. A notable exception in Embase (Ovid) are controlled vocabularies. A search for aerosolized particles and droplets/ [forward slash signifies a subject heading], will return zero results. However, if you enclose it in quotation marks, "aerosolized particles and droplets"/ , you'll correctly