Tip #13: Testing for Key Article Inclusion in Ovid MEDLINE & Ovid Embase
Carrie Price recently contributed a tip about how to test for key article inclusion in PubMed. It's easy to do this on the Ovid platform as well:
If I have identified any non-MEDLINE-indexed articles or abstracts for potential inclusion, I can create a separate test set using either Embase accession numbers (.an.) or DOIs (.do.). Example:
("2010856309" or "634311730" or "2004571446" or "629683516" or "2003913512" or "629412297" or "628695345" or "625666621" or "628536150" or "621393778" or "616100698" or "617713172" or "617799414" or "606187648" or "72062183" or "71920414" or "71835454" or "630692639" or "610922218" or "610465209" or "615421018").an.
Ovid MEDLINE
The syntax is a series of PMIDS combined with OR, nested in parentheses, and searched in the .ui. field (which is where PMIDs live in Ovid MEDLINE). The following example should retrieve 10 results:
(12450163 or 15982428 or 27391569 or 27940902 or 28941542 or 29056764 or 31651628 or 31874458 or 32340564 or 32855234).ui.
(12450163 or 15982428 or 27391569 or 27940902 or 28941542 or 29056764 or 31651628 or 31874458 or 32340564 or 32855234).ui.
You'll notice Ovid automatically wraps each PMID in quotation marks:
I have learned to sort the PMIDs in numeric order to make it easier to scan for and remove individual identifiers, which I often need to do during exploratory searching while the scope of the review question, as well as the inclusion and exclusion criteria, are still evolving.
Ovid Embase
If you want to test your Embase strategy - never a bad idea - you can do the same by recycling this same string and changing the field to .pm., which is where PMIDs live in Embase:(12450163 or 15982428 or 27391569 or 27940902 or 28941542 or 29056764 or 31651628 or 31874458 or 32340564 or 32855234).pm.
If you run this search, you'll notice only 9 articles are retrieved; comparing the PMIDs of the retrieved articles, I can see that one article (29056764) drops out because it is not indexed in Embase. Keep track of how many records the string retrieves in Embase the same way you would in MEDLINE.
("2010856309" or "634311730" or "2004571446" or "629683516" or "2003913512" or "629412297" or "628695345" or "625666621" or "628536150" or "621393778" or "616100698" or "617713172" or "617799414" or "606187648" or "72062183" or "71920414" or "71835454" or "630692639" or "610922218" or "610465209" or "615421018").an.
In a future post, I'll show how to recycle these lists to create test sets in Web of Science.
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