UX Caucus Database Tips

You might think that a recent publication indexed in PubMed with Epilepsy, Temporal Lobe* / pathology  would be retrieved by this query in Ovid MEDLINE :   *Epilepsy, Temporal Lobe / pa [Pathology]   You would be incorrect. One example is Xie K, Royer J, Larivière S, et al. Atypical connectome topography and signal flow in temporal lobe epilepsy. Prog Neurobiol. 2024;236:102604 . doi:10.1016/j.pneurobio.2024.102604.  and you can compare for yourself by searching for 38604584.ui in your preferred Ovid Medline segment, where it will show   This issue, of Major Topic MeSH-with-subheading not being accurately imported into Ovid, seems to affect literally every article since mid-2022 with a Heading/subheading combination marked as a Major Topic. What’s happening, and why? At the moment of intake processing, Ovid breaks apart headings consisting of a Major Topic and subheading.   NLM Data Ovid HIV Infections* ...

Scopus is a very large multidisciplinary database with a wide range of sources. According to Elsevier, almost 99% of journals indexed in Embase and MEDLINE are included in Scopus. Unlike Embase, which uses the Emtree thesaurus for indexing (the full Emtree thesaurus is only available in Embase), or MEDLINE, which uses MeSH (accessible publicly via the MeSH Browser or MeSH Database ), Scopus does not have its own controlled vocabulary or thesaurus searching capabilities. So what are the "indexed keywords" in Scopus? And are they beneficial or harmful to your searches? The origins of "indexed keywords" Journal article records in Scopus are supplied directly from publishers, and thus arrive with no indexing. Scopus then enriches these references whenever possible, using thesauri Elsevier either owns or licenses. The “indexed keywords” that display in references are added when Scopus finds an exact item match with a reference from Embase or MEDLINE. For example, an ar...