UX Caucus Database Tips

Many thanks to Jules Bailey, Health Sciences Librarian at Florida State University Libraries, for this week's tip! As librarians and search experts, we are all accustomed to "phrase searching" where putting two or more words together in "quotation marks" looks for those words together in that order in the search results rather than separately anywhere in an article or other resource. However, we don’t typically expect that adding quotation marks versus leaving them off would make a difference for single-word terms, as can be seen here in an example from Embase. Result #1 shows how Embase translates a search for discrimination typed into the basic search box—it yields results for the Emtree term ‘discrimination’/exp or the plain keyword. Embase also shows ‘single quotations’ in the search history, regardless of whether the typed-in search used those or "double quotations". In short, Embase yields the same number of results for a single-word term with an...

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...

Many thanks to Zahra Premji, Health Research Librarian from the University of Victoria Libraries ( @ZapTheLibrarian ), for this week's post! We frequently use the Web of Science Core Collection (WoSCC) Topic field for systematic searching in evidence synthesis, because it is a multi-field option that includes relevant fields such as title, abstract, and author-keywords. What is the Topic field searching? According to the Web of Science interface, the Topic field in WoSCC searches "title, abstract and author keywords" (January 10th, 2024).  This is a change from the description that was provided In the past (as recently as November 2023), where the Topic field description specifically mentioned title, abstract, author keywords, and keywords plus . So the removal of Keywords Plus from the Topic field description is a recent change. But you will see below that despite the field description (on the database) not mentioning Keywords plus, the TS field still includes Keywords p...

 Many thanks to Erica Lake (Outreach Coordinator, NNLM Region 6 ), and Amanda Sawyer and Jessica Chan from the NCBI PubMed team for this week's tip! Why is there a phrase index? The PubMed database contains more than 34 million citations and abstracts of biomedical literature and is growing by more than 1 million citations each year. PubMed uses a phrase index to provide efficient, cost-effective phrase searching while preserving system speed and performance for its 3.4+ million daily visitors. How does the phrase index work? Many phrases are automatically recognized by the subject translation table used in PubMed's Automatic Term Mapping (ATM ). For example, if you enter fever of unknown origin without enclosing it in double quotes, PubMed recognizes this phrase as a MeSH Term. You can bypass ATM and search for a specific phrase using the following formats: Enclose the phrase in double quotes: "kidney allograft" If you use quotes and the phrase is not found in the ph...

Search field tags are a quick way to specify the exact fields you would like to search when using keywords. For example, I can tell PubMed to search for my term only in the title field or only in the MeSH Terms field. You can view a list of available search fields from the drop down menu in PubMed's Advanced Search Builder. Specifying field tags for keywords is also a good practice in PubMed because keywords searched without field tags will be translated through Automatic Term Mapping which may reduce the precision of your results. Here are a few sample searches in my search history, including #4 which wasn't limited to a field (notice how it was translated in the expanded search details): The fields that are included in the [title/abstract] fields are pretty self-explanatory (words and numbers included in a citation's title, collection title, abstract, other abstract and author keywords), but what is actually included in the [Text Word] (can also be searched as [tw]) fi...

This tip was submitted by Kathryn Vanderboll (University of Michigan):  In Ovid MEDLINE, using adjacency with .kw. does not work the way you (probably) want - use .kf. instead! While searching (surg* adj (educat* or instruct* or learn* or teach* or train*)).kw., our team couldn't figure out why our sentinel article tagged with with the author supplied keyword "surgical teaching" wasn't showing up. Through trial and error, we learned that .kw. adjacency only works between lines . That is, how close keywords are to each other on different lines. For example, (surg* adj teach*).kw. picks up articles with keyword headings like:  But does NOT pick up articles that might have keyword headings like:   To use adjacency searching within a single keyword heading, you'll need to use .kf. The Ovid help documentation notes : "The Keyword Heading (KW) field contains the Keyword Headings assigned by authors. Keyword Headings are the author keywords. To retrieve every Key...