UX Caucus Database Tips

A huge thanks to John Reynolds , MLIS, from the Louis Calder Memorial Library at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, who wrote this post! Embase (Elsevier’s Embase.com) has recently added large numbers of clinical trials records to their database and includes them in search results by default. Starting in May 2025 they added 500,000 records from ClinicalTrials.gov and continue to add new records. See their FAQ for more information. Similarly, Cochrane CENTRAL (Wiley) has been adding clinical trials registry records from ClinicalTrials.org and the WHO ICTRP since 2023. It also contains registry records identified through its own Specialized Registers and Handsearch projects. See this FAQ on how trials records are added . While trials records can be useful for many kinds of research, many people may not want trials records in their search results, or may prefer to search trials registries directly. While both Embase and CENTRAL allow searchers to identify and limit search...

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.