UX Caucus Database Tips

The Crux: i n Scopus, enclose acronyms in curly brackets.  In 2022, Kate posted  Tip #9 Scopus - Loose vs. Exact Phrases . Essentially, to search for an EXACT phrase in Scopus, you'll need to enclose it in {curly brackets} rather than "double quotation marks."  In Tip #67 Subject Areas in Scopus May Amplify the Noise in Your Search , I wrote about a discovery I made in Scopus when searching the acronym DBS, signifying  deep brain stimulation .  I was getting substantially more results in non-medical subject areas than medical and was curious to know what DBS meant in non-medical areas. As I scanned resulting abstracts,  I was surprised to discover that most records included db in the abstract. It appeared that Scopus was treating DBS as the plural of db, which is the abbreviation for decibel, and returning results with both db and dbs. I confirmed this by testing that the search strings ABS (DBS) and ABS (db) returned the same number of records. It's inte...

Written by Hilary Kraus and Zahra Premji  Take a walk on the wild side! Join us for a deep dive into the world of wildcards. This post provides an introduction to how wildcards work, some potential  pitfalls  of using them, and detailed information about how to use them in many popular database platforms. Wildcards 101 Complex searching often involves looking for various forms and spellings of a word. One common approach to this is the use of wildcards. There are two varieties of wildcard. A mandatory wildcard replaces one letter; an optional wildcard replaces either zero or one letter. How these wildcards function and what syntax is used to operationalize them depends on where you're searching. In this post, we look at the ways commonly used databases (or database platforms) use wildcards. Going forward, we will use root to refer to a collection of Latin alphabet letters to which a wildcard may be applied. Since wildcards are typically executed using a punctuation mar...

The crux:  In Scopus, pay attention to Subject area  on the search results page to see if your search retrieves an unexpected number of records from non-relevant areas.  This is especially important when you include acronyms in a search.  The multidisciplinary nature of Scopus presents opportunities and challenges. This post focuses on one of the challenges - records that contain your terms but are wildly irrelevant. This is referred to as noise in a search. Scopus's subject area feature can alert you to noise in your search and provide clues to which terms are causing it.  On the left side of the Scopus results page are options for refining the search. This is where you find the feature called Subject area . But it may not work how you think.   Journal titles are classified in Scopus using its ASJC (All Science Journal Classification) scheme, a list of 361 numerical classification codes that correspond to subject areas. Classification is perform...

As a librarian, a common part of my job is to generate reports for departments on their publication outputs. Namely, this consists of creating a PubMed (or sometimes Scopus) search based on a list of names provided to me by the department. After a few years of these requests, I've been able to compile some insights, and, perhaps most importantly, shortcuts to speed up the process in PubMed.  As a note, I will only be discussing generating the author names search string, and not how to structure affiliation search strings (which is a whole other can of worms!). Basic structure of a PubMed author name search Author searches in PubMed are structured as last name followed by initials (e.g., Wilson P[au] OR Wilson PJ[au] ). PubMed automatically applies truncation to the last initial in the name without the need for truncation (in fact, using truncation with an author name can cause issues with the search, as discussed in the following section). This automatic truncation feature he...

Many thanks to Marijane White for this week's post!  Introducing the Pairwise PubMed Search Generator! The Pairwise PubMed Search Generator is a tool designed to streamline the creation of complex PubMed search strings. By using two lists of input terms, you can quickly generate search queries that can either be copied to your clipboard or launched directly in PubMed with a single click. This tool can save you thousands of keystrokes and help prevent errors in intricate search constructions.   Continue reading to learn more about PubMed’s pairwise search functionality, a brief overview of pairwise combinatorics, and of course, the tool itself. PubMed’s proximity search functionality The National Library of Medicine announced the addition of long-awaited proximity search capability to PubMed in the fall of 2022 . Initially only available in the Title and Title/Abstract fields, it was later made available for the Affiliation field as well, where it also limits the search to i...

EBSCOhost feels like it's taking over the blog right now, but this is a time of transition for the platform, and there's keen interest in understanding how the new UI impacts how we use it now and into the future. Here are some links to keep up with the rapid-fire changes and ways they affect the work of expert searchers! What's new and upcoming: The Research Platforms Roadmap filtered to EBSCOhost New EBSCO User Interfaces – Release Notes New EBSCO User Interface Updates for Advanced Search and Systematic Reviews EBSCO Experience Manager – Release Notes  (ways to customize your institution's interface!) Essential help files: EBSCO Database Help Files  (now in Connect rather than the database platform itself) Searching with Field Codes (downloadable comprehensive list for all databases) From the UX Caucus: EBSCOhost Idea Exchange: A Synthesis of Reported Issues  (December 2025) Problems, tickets, and enhancement requests in thirteen categories (e.g., search box behavio...

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...