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...

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. The event recording, chat transcript, presenter slide decks, and a summary of Q&A and tips culled from the chat 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: 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, MSLIS, MA , AHIP-D, Librarian, Banner Health Fun with PMIDs (24:55) Jenni...

On the EBSCO platform (or EBSCOhost, if you prefer), MEDLINE and APA PsycInfo both have searchable thesauri. However, while these two thesauri are both hierarchical, EBSCO does not index them in the same way, which leads to inconsistent explosion behavior. This post addresses just those two databases, but the issue itself is relevant across the EBSCO platform. According to EBSCO's documentation,   only MEDLINE, CINAHL, Environmental Policy Index and ERIC support traditional explosion . Those of us who search PubMed are accustomed to how the use of the search tag MeSH (i.e., [mesh] or [mh]) defaults to "explode." In PubMed, exploding begins at the selected term (e.g., Sleep), and retrieves results for that term and everything narrower, all the way to the bottom of the tree. There is no need to manually explode on any narrower terms, even if those terms, (e.g., Sleep Hygiene), have their own narrower terms.  The MEDLINE thesaurus works the same way on EBSCO. In the image be...

This topic comes up occasionally on Twitter and #medlibs listservs so I thought it would be good to make a post about it! Did you know that there is an email option for bulk exporting from EBSCO databases? It's not without its faults, but when it works, it can save you a lot of time (no more adding page-by-page of results into a folder!). Unless it is enabled for your institution, you may not even be aware that it is an option! From the upper right corner of your results list, click on the "Share" button and scroll down to "Export results." IF YOU DON'T SEE THE EXPORT RESULTS OPTION IN YOUR SHARE SCREEN , you will need to contact EBSCO Technical Support to enable this feature. You can export up to 25,000 records through this option. From the Export Manager screen, you'll be prompted to add your email address and select an output style: Then, hopefully within 5-10 minutes, you should receive an email from support@ebsco.com (make sure to check your spam ...

This week's tip is another contribution from our colleague Sandy Campbell  and her colleagues at the University of Alberta. Sandy writes: I don't think I sent you this one. It is another CINAHL weirdness. When I search Matis (which is the name of an Indigenous people), the first three results returned are "mates", but the 4th is MATIS. That one isn't the right subject, but you can see that it has interpreted the term matis as mates, as well as matis. It took me a while to figure out why when I was searching for South American Indigenous people, I got a paper on African rhinoscerous mates. "Matis" brings up 98 results. That should be enough to return a unique search. If you search Germa, it asks if you want to search Germa or Germany, but it doesn't do that with Matis So in my South American search hedge, I've ended up putting quotes around every term, just to be sure. Here are the numbers of  results returned by Sandy's search terms...

by Andy Hickner Like MEDLINE and Embase, CINAHL's thesaurus includes optional subheadings. The syntax is as follows: MW "[2-letter subheading abbreviation]". For example, the syntax for the floating subheading "prevention and control" is MW "PC" (you can substitute MJ if for some reason you want to search for this subheading only in combination with a major heading). Here's what this might look like in a search for articles about prevention of catheter-associated urinary tract infection: The floating subheading is line S8, combined with equivalent keywords in S10, and finally combined with CAUTI elements in S11. Further information:  Advanced Searching with CINAHL® Subject Headings . Update: A reader asked me where to find the list of available subheadings. As usual with EBSCOhost, it is incredibly difficult to locate the CINAHL Database Information, so I am copy-pasting the list here: Code   Subheading   AB   Abnormalities   AM   Administration  ...