UX Caucus Database Tips

Many thanks to Amy Nadell, Medical Librarian from Banner Health for this week's post! Embase.com offers two extensions for enhancing search strategies:  "Explosion and all synonyms" /syn and "As broad as possible" /br . Effectively utilizing these extensions will improve the efficiency and comprehensiveness of clinical literature searches. Both /br and /syn are available options from the Emtree thesaurus:  The "Explosion and all synonyms" /syn extension is particularly beneficial when searching for terms related to drugs or medical conditions. It includes the primary Emtree term along with all narrower (child) Emtree terms and synonyms associated with the primary term. The associated synonyms are listed on the Emtree record. You also have the option of copying the list of synonyms from this screen for pasting into the search screen directly (helpful if you want to limit to a specific field): When you use /syn , you do not need to manually list every...

When is a hyphen not a hyphen? When it is a longer hyphen. Dashes range in size from the most narrow, known as a hyphen , to the the slightly wider en dash , to the widest em dash . The en dash is used to represent a span or range of numbers, dates, or time. The em dash can take the place of commas, parentheses, and colons. Unfortunately, neither is meant to appear in your search query in Ovid EMBASE .  Two-part or "hyphenated"  used-for terms in Emtree (EMBASE's thesaurus) on the Ovid platform appear to have either en or em dashes instead of hyphens. I discovered that if you paste one of these "hyphenated" terms into the search box, it returns an unsupported characters error .   For example, if you copy/paste  harmal−d , a used-for term for the medication  tamsulosin ,   into the search box, it will return an unsupported characters error. However, if you replace the long hyphen by typing the hyphen key, your search will work. I contacted Ovid Suppor...

 I recently sought help from colleagues on the expertsearching listserv  regarding puzzling results I was seeing in Embase (in this case, on the Ovid platform). I was searching for articles about the category of medical trainees known in the USA as residents. Here's the scope note for the EMTREE term "resident": (For screen reader users: The scope note cites the Dorland's definition, "a graduate and licensed physician receiving training in a specialty, usually in a hospital," and states this subject heading is synonymous with "interns and residents, resident doctor, resident physician, resident surgeon, surgery resident, surgical resident.") So far, so good, right? Well, here are the first 5 results for exp resident/ :  COVID-19 in French Nursing Homes during the Second Pandemic Wave: A Mixed-Methods Cross-Sectional Study COVID-19 vaccine effectiveness against laboratory confirmed symptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infection, COVID-19 related hospitalizations ...