UX Caucus Database Tips

If you're like me and learned to use Ovid many years ago, you will sometimes miss new features on the platform. I learned about one of these features last week while participating in user testing for Ovid. The feature, Term Finder , is not new at all at this point - it was released in fall 2020!  Term Finder is an alternative way to look up MeSH in Ovid MEDLINE. It's located to the right of the search bar. It returns any mapped terms along with the various features -- the tree, entry terms, the scope note, available subheadings, etc. -- that we're used to navigating in the old step-by-step term mapping: I haven't had the opportunity to use the Term Finder for a search yet. As a single-line searcher who prefers to construct his searches in a text document rather than "on the fly" in the platform, however, it may end up making the process of gathering MeSH terms a bit more efficient. If you've used the Term Finder, let us know in the comments if you've f...

 This week's tip is brought to us by Ursula Ellis from the University of British Columbia. She credits her colleague Mathew Vis-Dunbar for coming up with this solution! Thanks to you both! "If you search for an exact phrase which contains a stopword in Ovid, the stopword will be ignored and other words will be searched in the order entered, within 2 words of each other. For instance, line 1 of this search finds "treatment and prevention," "treatment or prevention," etc, but not "prevention and treatment" which is found by line 2: This is not ideal for many phrases in which the stopword is a critical piece of the search phrase. There are two options to solve this issue in Ovid. One is to get in touch with your rep and ask them to turn off "runtime stopword processing," as described here: https://wkhealth.force.com/ ovidsupport/s/article/ Stopwords-and-phrase- searching-in-Ovid-databases However, for large institutions, it i...

This week, we are highlighting a new tool developed by our colleague Edwin Sperr. Ed's Mapping Tester helps searchers identify any changes in automatic term mapping (ATM) in the new PubMed compared to "old" PubMed. Check out Ed's blog post for a discussion of the changes to ATM, a detailed description of the Mapping Tester, and examples of how it works.  We're interested in more posts about the changes to ATM and how you're adapting to them; if you'd like to contribute a tip, email Andy at: alh4014 AT med.cornell.edu.