UX Caucus Database Tips

Many thanks to Jocelyn Boice, Colorado State University Libraries for this week's post! This work is based on the author’s lightning talk “Tricky Truncation in ProQuest Databases” presented at the Medical Library Association UX Caucus’ event Favorite Features & Sneaky Solutions: A Database Tips Lightning Round on October 7, 2024. The Basics In the ProQuest interface, the asterisk truncation feature works in a different way than one might expect. Instead of returning results including any variant of a truncated word, it only includes variants with five letters or fewer after the root. This character limit has the potential to eliminate relevant results from a search rather than expanding the results set as one would anticipate. ProQuest’s documentation describes truncation with an asterisk as follows. "The truncation character in ProQuest is an asterisk (*) -- used to replace up to five characters [emphasis added]. For example, a search for farm* will retrieve documents w...

You probably know that Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) evolve over time; you can read more about why and how in the Introduction to MeSH , under Changes to MeSH Terminology. You may also have noticed that, in the MeSH Database , some MeSH headings have no dates, some have one, and some have two. "What do the dates mean in MeSH?" is a hot topic (and is explained in this brief YouTube video , if you'd like the basics in less than two minutes).  To sum up: If no date is listed, it means the term has been used since MEDLINE began in 1963.  If there's a single date, it's the year the term was introduced, and no other term has ever been used for that concept. If two dates are listed next to Year introduced, which looks like YYYY (earlier yyyy) : The first date, YYYY , is when that MeSH heading was added, but not when the concept  was first added to MEDLINE. The date in parentheses ( earlier yyyy ) is when the concept  was introduced, but at the time was called somethin...