UX Caucus Database Tips

It’s alive! Or we wish it were. On June 16th, 2026, the Medical Library Association User Experience Caucus hosted the networking event, “Building a (Database) Creature with the Best Features”, at the Library Evidence Synthesis Services Symposium ( LESSS) .  During this event, more than sixty evidence synthesis librarians across disciplines assembled in an unscientific effort to cobble together their dream database platform based on the ones they search every day.

The Crux: i n Scopus, enclose acronyms in curly brackets.  In 2022, Kate posted  Tip #9 Scopus - Loose vs. Exact Phrases . Essentially, to search for an EXACT phrase in Scopus, you'll need to enclose it in {curly brackets} rather than "double quotation marks."  In Tip #67 Subject Areas in Scopus May Amplify the Noise in Your Search , I wrote about a discovery I made in Scopus when searching the acronym DBS, signifying  deep brain stimulation .  I was getting substantially more results in non-medical subject areas than medical and was curious to know what DBS meant in non-medical areas. As I scanned resulting abstracts,  I was surprised to discover that most records included db in the abstract. It appeared that Scopus was treating DBS as the plural of db, which is the abbreviation for decibel, and returning results with both db and dbs. I confirmed this by testing that the search strings ABS (DBS) and ABS (db) returned the same number of records. It's inte...