Tip #20: Stop Words within Phrases in Ovid

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 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 is likely not feasible to have this option turned off long-term. A workaround for phrases involving one of these words:

and, as, for, from, is, of, that, the, this, to, was, were

...is to truncate the stopword:" 

 

Comments

  1. Layal HneinyJune 13, 2022 at 11:56 AM

    Nice!!!! thanks for sharing

    ReplyDelete
  2. elgraOctober 27, 2022 at 12:51 PM

    Last year, I asked Ovid support to turn off temporarily "runtime stopword processing". It was turned off, but actually, it didn't work, the results were the same than when it was on. They were never able to really turn off this option. I tested it, the person from Ovid tested it and we came to the same conclusion. Maybe it changed since then, but that was quite disappointing.

    ReplyDelete

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