UX Caucus Database Tips

What is a Subheading? Subheadings allow searchers to improve the precision of a search that uses controlled vocabulary by further focusing on a narrower aspect of the topic. Here's an example of how subheadings (or qualifiers) are displayed for an indexed article in PubMed. Subheadings (highlighted in red) appear to the right of a slash following the Medical Subject Heading (MeSH). How to Use Subheadings in PubMed To build a PubMed search using subheadings, you have a few different options depending on the type of search you need. You can start from the MeSH database to build a search using Medical Subject Headings with subheadings applied. Find the MeSH term of interest, then from the record page you can select various subheadings that are relevant to that topic, and click "Add to search builder" to create the search. Click "Search PubMed" to run your search.     In the PubMed searches below, you'll see that the search with the " surgery " subhe

The UX Caucus, formally known as "Features & Flaws", launched a Google form Issues Tracker in early 2019 to help information professionals report and communicate usability problems with electronic resources. Our goals for the tracker included improving communication between information professionals and vendors; better-informed licensing decisions; and ultimately, better interfaces for all searchers. The initial version of this tracker also included an automatically generated analytics view that displayed aggregated form submission data.  In order to expand the tracker's audience, the MLA launched a pilot in early 2020 , where users were encouraged to not only submit UX issues, but also provide any feedback or suggestions to improve the tracking tool. After a period of about 6 months, we received nearly 40 issue submissions and some fantastic feedback to make the tool easier to use. Based on the pilot feedback, the UX Caucus team launched a revamped Issues Tracker

 Many thanks to Erica Lake (Outreach Coordinator, NNLM Region 6 ), and Amanda Sawyer and Jessica Chan from the NCBI PubMed team for this week's tip! Why is there a phrase index? The PubMed database contains more than 34 million citations and abstracts of biomedical literature and is growing by more than 1 million citations each year. PubMed uses a phrase index to provide efficient, cost-effective phrase searching while preserving system speed and performance for its 3.4+ million daily visitors. How does the phrase index work? Many phrases are automatically recognized by the subject translation table used in PubMed's Automatic Term Mapping (ATM ). For example, if you enter fever of unknown origin without enclosing it in double quotes, PubMed recognizes this phrase as a MeSH Term. You can bypass ATM and search for a specific phrase using the following formats: Enclose the phrase in double quotes: "kidney allograft" If you use quotes and the phrase is not found in the ph