UX Caucus Database Tips

On the EBSCO platform (or EBSCOhost, if you prefer), MEDLINE and APA PsycInfo both have searchable thesauri. However, while these two thesauri are both hierarchical, EBSCO does not index them in the same way, which leads to inconsistent explosion behavior. This post addresses just those two databases, but the issue itself is relevant across the EBSCO platform. According to EBSCO's documentation,   only MEDLINE, CINAHL, Environmental Policy Index and ERIC support traditional explosion . Those of us who search PubMed are accustomed to how the use of the search tag MeSH (i.e., [mesh] or [mh]) defaults to "explode." In PubMed, exploding begins at the selected term (e.g., Sleep), and retrieves results for that term and everything narrower, all the way to the bottom of the tree. There is no need to manually explode on any narrower terms, even if those terms, (e.g., Sleep Hygiene), have their own narrower terms.  The MEDLINE thesaurus works the same way on EBSCO. In the image be...

Many thanks to Erica Lake (Outreach Coordinator, NNLM Region 6 ) for this week's tip! LitSense is a free, web-based tool from NLM that enables simultaneous semantic searching of PubMed and PMC content. LitSense searches at the sentence-level rather than the article-level, allowing for direct retrieval of specific statements. And it searches by best-match and by meaning, retrieving articles containing sentences with an exact match of keywords as well as those with semantic similarity. Popular uses of this product Discover similar findings across different studies to compare and contrast. Locate and validate publications for evidence attribution. Identify MeSH terms and keyword variations for a PubMed search by reviewing the semantically similar results. Retrieve citations containing a phrase used by requestors when discussing their search topic or completing a search request form. Non-experts can type in a question as a sentence and retrieve relevant information without having to...