UX Caucus Database Tips

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 ...

What is a PMID? A PMID, also known as the PubMed Identifier, is a unique number assigned by the National Library of Medicine to all records included in PubMed. It appears under the citation information on each record. PMIDs do not change over time or during processing and are never reused. Searching for articles using their PMIDs can be a very efficient way to find known items or test searches (e.g., Testing for Article Inclusion in Ovid and Testing for Articles in PubMed ). To search for a set of known records in PubMed, enter a string of PMIDs in the search box without the Boolean "OR" and without the [pmid] field tag. If you use [pmid], you will need to use the Boolean "OR" to combine them. These three searches return the same results: 26104772 11038025 35106283 26104772 OR 11038025 OR 35106283 26104772[pmid] OR 11038025[pmid] OR 35106283[pmid] Below we will highlight some search tips for finding PMIDs across various databases Too long didn't read (tldr) c...

On October 7, 2024, the Medical Library Association's User Experience (UX) Caucus held a database tips lightning round. Watch the entire event recording! MLA UX Caucus Database Tips Lightning Round * (October 2024)  View presenter slide decks, the full chat transcript, and a summary of Q&A and tips culled from the chat: Lightning Round documents  (October 2024) The presenters and their topics, with timestamps of when they appear in the video, were: Methodology and Publication Type Filters in EBSCOhost Databases (00:40) Marilia Antunez, MA (LIS), MA,  Life & Allied Health Sciences Librarian, Associate Professor, The University of Akron (OH) Tricky Truncation in ProQuest Databases (07:15) Jocelyn Boice, Associate Professor / Collection Strategies and Data Analysis Librarian, Colorado State University Libraries Embase Query Translator (12:52) Molly Higgins, Systematic Review Librarian, USDA NESR What’s Included in Emtree’s /syn and /br (19:20) Amy Nadell, M...

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* ...