UX Caucus Database Tips

Search field tags are a quick way to specify the exact fields you would like to search when using keywords. For example, I can tell PubMed to search for my term only in the title field or only in the MeSH Terms field. You can view a list of available search fields from the drop down menu in PubMed's Advanced Search Builder. Specifying field tags for keywords is also a good practice in PubMed because keywords searched without field tags will be translated through Automatic Term Mapping which may reduce the precision of your results. Here are a few sample searches in my search history, including #4 which wasn't limited to a field (notice how it was translated in the expanded search details): The fields that are included in the [title/abstract] fields are pretty self-explanatory (words and numbers included in a citation's title, collection title, abstract, other abstract and author keywords), but what is actually included in the [Text Word] (can also be searched as [tw]) fi...

Ovid MEDLINE has a beta feature (reach out to your Ovid rep to place a request to enable it!) called Analyze which can be accessed to the upper right of search results: It is currently available for Advanced searches in Ovid MEDLINE only. Once it is enabled, perform an Advanced Search and you'll see the Analyze button above your search results. To disable it, you can treat it as you would any other INI setting or simply replace the word YES with the word NO. It will analyze up to the first 5,000 results of a search, providing MeSH and author keywords in order of frequency: I've started to use this in exploratory searching for 2 purposes. The first is to identify relevant MeSH and keywords I might not have thought of; the second is to provide my collaborators with a high-level sense of what the literature looks like. The latter can be useful when the initial research question is very broad or poorly defined, as is often the case with early-stage systematic or scoping reviews...