UX Caucus Database Tips

On February 19, 2025, the Medical Library Association's User Experience (UX) Caucus held its second database tips lightning round. The event recording, chat transcript, and slide decks can be found in the files section of the UX Caucus' OSF site ! The presenters and their topics, with timestamps of when they appear in the video, were: Sneaky Solution: Searching for Articles on Ethical Values (05:40) Lorraine Porcello, MSLIS, MSIM, Position Title: Lead Librarian, Health Sciences  RSS Feeds for Librarians: Tracking Subtopics and Trends (18:59) Esther Garcia, Senior Health Science Librarian, Texas Woman’s University Using Ovid's Basic Search Function to Build Search Strategies (34:58) Bronwyn Sutherland, Liaison Librarian, Texas Medical Center Library Quotations Around Single-Word Terms in PubMed (46:07) Jules Bailey, Health Sciences Librarian, Florida State University Libraries Special Characters in PubMed (59:23) [apologies, no closed captions for this presentation]  K...

For evidence synthesis projects, it's critical for research teams to be in accord on eligibility criteria. I encourage my teams to perform a pilot screening of a subset of retrieved citations to identify where they may not agree before they undertake the formal screening process. This requires importing a sample of records to Covidence, our institutional evidence synthesis management tool.  The process I describe exports a random sample of records from an Ovid database to EndNote in order to convert the exported file to a compatible filetype (XML) for import to Covidence. Regardless of the reference and synthesis management tools you use, the steps I describe in Ovid remain the same. For pilot screening in Covidence, if I were to simply export the first 50 citations retrieved by a search, I may introduce selection bias.  According to Wolters Kluwer, owner of the Ovid platform, the last item added or updated in the database is the first displayed in the results when using Advan...

Many thanks to Jules Bailey, Health Sciences Librarian at Florida State University Libraries, for this week's tip! As librarians and search experts, we are all accustomed to "phrase searching" where putting two or more words together in "quotation marks" looks for those words together in that order in the search results rather than separately anywhere in an article or other resource. However, we don’t typically expect that adding quotation marks versus leaving them off would make a difference for single-word terms, as can be seen here in an example from Embase. Result #1 shows how Embase translates a search for discrimination typed into the basic search box—it yields results for the Emtree term ‘discrimination’/exp or the plain keyword. Embase also shows ‘single quotations’ in the search history, regardless of whether the typed-in search used those or "double quotations". In short, Embase yields the same number of results for a single-word term with an...

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...

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...

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...