UX Caucus Database Tips

Many thanks to Amy Nadell, Medical Librarian from Banner Health for this week's post! Embase.com offers two extensions for enhancing search strategies:  "Explosion and all synonyms" /syn and "As broad as possible" /br . Effectively utilizing these extensions will improve the efficiency and comprehensiveness of clinical literature searches. Both /br and /syn are available options from the Emtree thesaurus:  The "Explosion and all synonyms" /syn extension is particularly beneficial when searching for terms related to drugs or medical conditions. It includes the primary Emtree term along with all narrower (child) Emtree terms and synonyms associated with the primary term. The associated synonyms are listed on the Emtree record. You also have the option of copying the list of synonyms from this screen for pasting into the search screen directly (helpful if you want to limit to a specific field): When you use /syn , you do not need to manually list every...

ClinicalTrials.gov requires phrases be enclosed in quotation marks. Without quotes, it defaults to Boolean OR and finds any study that contains either word. For example,  placebo procedure  returns over 15,000 records, while  "placebo procedure" results in only 39 records.  A database requiring a phrase to be enclosed in quotation marks is commonplace. However, in ClinicalTrials.gov, smart quotes are not recognized as quotation marks. Many searchers, including myself, build searches in Microsoft Word, which defaults to autocorrecting plain (or straight) quotes (" ") to smart (or curly) quotes (‟ ”). In the example below, the first phrase uses straight quotes and the second phrase uses smart quotes: "placebo procedure"   “placebo procedure” If you copy and paste searches directly from Microsoft Word, it's most likely that your search will include smart quotes. ClinicalTrials.gov will ignore your smart quotes and treat your phrase as a Boolean OR.  In ...