UX Caucus Database Tips

The crux:  In Scopus, pay attention to Subject area  on the search results page to see if your search retrieves an unexpected number of records from non-relevant areas.  This is especially important when you include acronyms in a search.  The multidisciplinary nature of Scopus presents opportunities and challenges. This post focuses on one of the challenges - records that contain your terms but are wildly irrelevant. This is referred to as noise in a search. Scopus's subject area feature can alert you to noise in your search and provide clues to which terms are causing it.  On the left side of the Scopus results page, are options for refining the search. This is where you find the feature called Subject area . But it may not work how you think.   Journal titles are classified in Scopus using its ASJC (All Science Journal Classification) scheme, a list of 361 numerical classification codes that correspond to subject areas. Classification is perfor...

As a librarian, a common part of my job is to generate reports for departments on their publication outputs. Namely, this consists of creating a PubMed (or sometimes Scopus) search based on a list of names provided to me by the department. After a few years of these requests, I've been able to compile some insights, and, perhaps most importantly, shortcuts to speed up the process in PubMed.  As a note, I will only be discussing generating the author names search string, and not how to structure affiliation search strings (which is a whole other can of worms!). Basic structure of a PubMed author name search Author searches in PubMed are structured as last name followed by initials (e.g., Wilson P[au] OR Wilson PJ[au] ). PubMed automatically applies truncation to the last initial in the name without the need for truncation (in fact, using truncation with an author name can cause issues with the search, as discussed in the following section). This automatic truncation feature he...