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Tip #56: Tricky Truncation in ProQuest Databases

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Many thanks to Jocelyn Boice, Colorado State University Libraries for this week's post! This work is based on the author’s lightning talk “Tricky Truncation in ProQuest Databases” presented at the Medical Library Association UX Caucus’ event Favorite Features & Sneaky Solutions: A Database Tips Lightning Round on October 7, 2024. The Basics In the ProQuest interface, the asterisk truncation feature works in a different way than one might expect. Instead of returning results including any variant of a truncated word, it only includes variants with five letters or fewer after the root. This character limit has the potential to eliminate relevant results from a search rather than expanding the results set as one would anticipate. ProQuest’s documentation describes truncation with an asterisk as follows. "The truncation character in ProQuest is an asterisk (*) -- used to replace up to five characters [emphasis added]. For example, a search for farm* will retrieve documents w...
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Tip #55: How and why to search previous indexing of MeSH terms in PubMed, plus the alphabet soup of PubMed's date fields

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You probably know that Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) evolve over time; you can read more about why and how in the Introduction to MeSH , under Changes to MeSH Terminology. You may also have noticed that, in the MeSH Database , some MeSH headings have no dates, some have one, and some have two. "What do the dates mean in MeSH?" is a hot topic (and is explained in this brief YouTube video , if you'd like the basics in less than two minutes).  To sum up: If no date is listed, it means the term has been used since MEDLINE began in 1963.  If there's a single date, it's the year the term was introduced, and no other term has ever been used for that concept. If two dates are listed next to Year introduced, which looks like YYYY (earlier yyyy) : The first date, YYYY , is when that MeSH heading was added, but not when the concept  was first added to MEDLINE. The date in parentheses ( earlier yyyy ) is when the concept  was introduced, but at the time was called somethin...
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Tip #54: Embase.com /syn and /br

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Many thanks to Amy Nadell, Medical Librarian from Banner Health for this week's post! Embase.com offers two extensions for enhancing search strategies:  "Explosion and all synonyms" /syn and "As broad as possible" /br . Effectively utilizing these extensions will improve the efficiency and comprehensiveness of clinical literature searches. Both /br and /syn are available options from the Emtree thesaurus:  The "Explosion and all synonyms" /syn extension is particularly beneficial when searching for terms related to drugs or medical conditions. It includes the primary Emtree term along with all narrower (child) Emtree terms and synonyms associated with the primary term. The associated synonyms are listed on the Emtree record. You also have the option of copying the list of synonyms from this screen for pasting into the search screen directly (helpful if you want to limit to a specific field): When you use /syn , you do not need to manually list every...
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Tip #53: "Smart Quotes" aren't so in ClinicalTrials.gov

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ClinicalTrials.gov requires phrases be enclosed in quotation marks. Without quotes, it defaults to Boolean OR and finds any study that contains either word. For example,  placebo procedure  returns over 15,000 records, while  "placebo procedure" results in only 39 records.  A database requiring a phrase to be enclosed in quotation marks is commonplace. However, in ClinicalTrials.gov, smart quotes are not recognized as quotation marks. Many searchers, including myself, build searches in Microsoft Word, which defaults to autocorrecting plain (or straight) quotes (" ") to smart (or curly) quotes (‟ ”). In the example below, the first phrase uses straight quotes and the second phrase uses smart quotes: "placebo procedure"   “placebo procedure” If you copy and paste searches directly from Microsoft Word, it's most likely that your search will include smart quotes. ClinicalTrials.gov will ignore your smart quotes and treat your phrase as a Boolean OR.  In ...
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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...
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Favorite Features & Sneaky Solutions: A Database Tips Lightning Round: View the recording!

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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, M...
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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* ...
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