UX Caucus Database Tips

  Guest post by Erika Lake,  erica-lake@uiowa.edu The National Library of Medicine is pleased to announce proximity search capabilities have been added to PubMed. This means you can now search for multiple terms appearing in any order within a specified distance of one another in the [Title] or [Title/Abstract] fields. You’ll find details on how to build a proximity search as well as examples in the new NLM Technical Bulletin article, PubMed Update: Proximity Search Now Available in PubMed . You can also check out the newly added “Proximity Searching” section of the PubMed User Guide here: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/help/#proximity-searching Finally, NLM’s Office of Education and Training and NCBI have assembled a Quick Tour introducing users to the basics of Proximity Searching, which can be found via this direct link . This tour has also been added to the PubMed Trainer’s Toolkit . Have fun exploring, and email Erica Lake at erica-lake@uiowa.edu to let her know what you think.

Today's tip is from Rose Turner, rlt@pitt.edu, and her partner Tom Murphy VII . Rose writes,   I’m working on an Ovid SR and something that I’ve done is added a bookmark to my toolbar that resizes the Ovid query box. With the new interface the box is bigger, but it can still be annoying for me to resize to build or look at long strings. Example:   To add the bookmark: Right-click on your browser toolbar and select “Add Bookmark” (Firefox) or “Add page” (Chrome). Name the bookmark (ex, “Ovid Resize”) Add URL: javascript:document.getElementById('ovidclassic_focus').setAttribute('style', 'width:880px; height:200px'); You can customize the window size by changing the width and height numbers (mine are set to 880 by 200 px)   Now when you are working in Ovid you can just click your “Resize” bookmark to make the query box larger.     You can set it up to have as much space as you want.

This week's tip comes to us from Paije Wilson , MLIS Health Sciences Librarian at the Ebling Library. She credits the Systematic Reviews, Scoping Reviews, and other Knowledge Syntheses guide from McGill Library as the original source for the tip. You can filter results in Scopus by date added to the database . I've found this handy when researchers want everything added to a database after or before a specific date, regardless of when the items were published. ORIG-LOAD-DATE > [insert Unix time without brackets or year month day] ORIG-LOAD-DATE < [insert Unix time without brackets or year month day] For example, ORIG-LOAD-DATE > 1616907600 or ORIG-LOAD-DATE > 20210328 will retrieve items added to Scopus after March 28, 2021 (regardless of publication date).  You can also AND a before and after filter together to get a date range. I've only seen this tip on a couple of pages, including this blog page ( https://christinaslisrant.scientopia.org/2014/04/29/se

This week's tip is another contribution from our colleague Sandy Campbell  and her colleagues at the University of Alberta. Sandy writes: I don't think I sent you this one. It is another CINAHL weirdness. When I search Matis (which is the name of an Indigenous people), the first three results returned are "mates", but the 4th is MATIS. That one isn't the right subject, but you can see that it has interpreted the term matis as mates, as well as matis. It took me a while to figure out why when I was searching for South American Indigenous people, I got a paper on African rhinoscerous mates. "Matis" brings up 98 results. That should be enough to return a unique search. If you search Germa, it asks if you want to search Germa or Germany, but it doesn't do that with Matis So in my South American search hedge, I've ended up putting quotes around every term, just to be sure. Here are the numbers of  results returned by Sandy's search terms