UX Caucus Database Tips

One big frustration expert searchers have identified in the new EBSCOhost user interface (UI) is the inaccessibility of the search history when viewing search results. Never fear! You can now customize the functionality of the Advanced Search Results Page -- or at least, your institution's EBSCO administrator can. The Advanced version of the Advanced Search Results Page (yes, we recognize that language is a little redundant) puts the Search history toggle between the search boxes and results, similar to the old UI, and offers some of the old search history options. The Search history here operates similarly to, but not exactly the same as, Recent activity in My dashboard in the left navigation sidebar. When toggled open on the Advanced Search Results Page, Search history allows you to: Select sets and combine them with either AND or OR using the provided buttons. (Just typing set numbers and Boolean operators in the search boxes also still works, no matter what search page you...

On November 19th, 2025, the User Experience (UX) Caucus of the Medical Library Association hosted the EBSCOhost Idea Exchange, an open forum for the library community to come together with their questions, solutions, outstanding issues, and suggested enhancements for the new EBSCOhost user interface (UI). Hundreds of information professionals contributed their expertise at the event itself, as well as through Padlet posts and collaborative Google Docs. The Evidence Synthesis Methods Interest Group (Association of College & Research Libraries, American Library Association) also shared dozens of extant EBSCO Connect tickets for EBSCOhost's new UI.  The UX Caucus team has synthesized all of these contributions into a single PDF report,  EBSCOhost Idea Exchange: A Synthesis of Reported Issues , available on the UX Caucus OSF site . Please share this resource widely! We have already shared it with representatives at EBSCO at their request.  We know this snapshot report is ...

You may have noticed that some references in EBSCOhost APA PsycInfo have two subject heading sections. One is labeled--somewhat ambiguously-- Subjects ; the other is more clearly marked as  Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) . Subjects  are, of course, from the APA Thesaurus of Psychological Index Terms. According to APA, "approximately 33% of APA PsycInfo records are cross-listed in PubMed," and the MeSH field in APA PsycInfo was introduced in 2016 . A logical assumption, then, is that records since that date would include MeSH and that the terms in that section would match exactly what appears in whatever flavor of MEDLINE you search (EBSCOhost MEDLINE, PubMed, Ovid MEDLINE). But no! Here's an example, using the article  8-week Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction induces brain changes similar to traditional long-term meditation practice—A systematic review  (doi:  10.1016/j.bandc.2016.07.001 ). These are the relevant sections from that reference in EBSCOhost APA P...

The APA Thesaurus of Psychological Index Terms is an essential indexing tool that is also an indispensable searching tool. That said, its utility in systematic searching is highly dependent on interface. Ovid APA PsycInfo In Ovid APA PsycInfo, per the Ovid Database Guide , the following searchable field codes for APA Thesaurus terms are available: SH: Subject Headings [Phrase Indexed] The Subject Headings (SH) field contains the Subject Headings (also known as "descriptors" or "index terms") from the American Psychological Association's Thesaurus of Psychological Index Terms. Indexers at the APA use the terms to describe the topic or content of a document. HW:  Heading Word [Word Indexed] The Heading Word (HW) index allows you to retrieve every subject heading that includes a particular word by searching a single word in the Subject Heading (SH) field. In addition, there is a MeSH field in APA PsycInfo that can be searched using the following field codes: MH M...

Written by Hilary Kraus and Zahra Premji Why is proximity searching valuable? In systematic searching, there is an inherent tension between sensitivity and precision. According to the Cochrane Handbook, "Searches for systematic reviews aim to be as extensive as possible in order to ensure that as many of the relevant studies as possible are included in the review. It is, however, necessary to strike a balance between striving for comprehensiveness and maintaining relevance when developing a search strategy." ( Chapter 4, Section 4.4.3: Sensitivity versus precision ) One strategy for achieving this balance is the use of proximity operators. As explained in the Cochrane Handbook's Technical Supplement to Chapter 4, "Use of proximity operators helps to ensure that searches are more sensitive than would be the case with direct adjacency or phrase searching, and can also facilitate ease of searching where there are multiple possible variations of a phrase which would othe...

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...