UX Caucus Database Tips

Written by Hilary Kraus and Zahra Premji Why is proximity searching valuable? In systematic searching, there is an inherent tension between sensitivity and precision. According to the Cochrane Handbook, "Searches for systematic reviews aim to be as extensive as possible in order to ensure that as many of the relevant studies as possible are included in the review. It is, however, necessary to strike a balance between striving for comprehensiveness and maintaining relevance when developing a search strategy." ( Chapter 4, Section 4.4.3: Sensitivity versus precision ) One strategy for achieving this balance is the use of proximity operators. As explained in the Cochrane Handbook's Technical Supplement to Chapter 4, "Use of proximity operators helps to ensure that searches are more sensitive than would be the case with direct adjacency or phrase searching, and can also facilitate ease of searching where there are multiple possible variations of a phrase which would othe...

On February 19, 2025, the Medical Library Association's User Experience (UX) Caucus held its second database tips lightning round. The event recording, chat transcript, and slide decks can be found in the files section of the UX Caucus' OSF site ! The presenters and their topics, with timestamps of when they appear in the video, were: Sneaky Solution: Searching for Articles on Ethical Values (05:40) Lorraine Porcello, MSLIS, MSIM, Position Title: Lead Librarian, Health Sciences  RSS Feeds for Librarians: Tracking Subtopics and Trends (18:59) Esther Garcia, Senior Health Science Librarian, Texas Woman’s University Using Ovid's Basic Search Function to Build Search Strategies (34:58) Bronwyn Sutherland, Liaison Librarian, Texas Medical Center Library Quotations Around Single-Word Terms in PubMed (46:07) Jules Bailey, Health Sciences Librarian, Florida State University Libraries Special Characters in PubMed (59:23) [apologies, no closed captions for this presentation]  K...

For evidence synthesis projects, it's critical for research teams to be in accord on eligibility criteria. I encourage my teams to perform a pilot screening of a subset of retrieved citations to identify where they may not agree before they undertake the formal screening process. This requires importing a sample of records to Covidence, our institutional evidence synthesis management tool.  The process I describe exports a random sample of records from an Ovid database to EndNote in order to convert the exported file to a compatible filetype (XML) for import to Covidence. Regardless of the reference and synthesis management tools you use, the steps I describe in Ovid remain the same. For pilot screening in Covidence, if I were to simply export the first 50 citations retrieved by a search, I may introduce selection bias.  According to Wolters Kluwer, owner of the Ovid platform, the last item added or updated in the database is the first displayed in the results when using Advan...

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...

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* ...