UX Caucus Database Tips

A huge thanks to John Reynolds , MLIS, from the Louis Calder Memorial Library at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, who wrote this post! Embase (Elsevier’s Embase.com) has recently added large numbers of clinical trials records to their database and includes them in search results by default. Starting in May 2025 they added 500,000 records from ClinicalTrials.gov and continue to add new records. See their FAQ for more information. Similarly, Cochrane CENTRAL (Wiley) has been adding clinical trials registry records from ClinicalTrials.org and the WHO ICTRP since 2023. It also contains registry records identified through its own Specialized Registers and Handsearch projects. See this FAQ on how trials records are added . While trials records can be useful for many kinds of research, many people may not want trials records in their search results, or may prefer to search trials registries directly. While both Embase and CENTRAL allow searchers to identify and limit search...

It’s alive! Or we wish it were. On June 16th, 2026, the Medical Library Association User Experience Caucus hosted the networking event, “Building a (Database) Creature with the Best Features”, at the Library Evidence Synthesis Services Symposium ( LESSS) .  During this event, more than sixty evidence synthesis librarians across disciplines assembled in an unscientific effort to cobble together their dream database platform based on the ones they search every day.

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...