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...

This week's tip comes to us from Paije Wilson , MLIS Health Sciences Librarian at the Ebling Library. She credits the Systematic Reviews, Scoping Reviews, and other Knowledge Syntheses guide from McGill Library as the original source for the tip. You can filter results in Scopus by date added to the database . I've found this handy when researchers want everything added to a database after or before a specific date, regardless of when the items were published. ORIG-LOAD-DATE > [insert Unix time without brackets or year month day] ORIG-LOAD-DATE < [insert Unix time without brackets or year month day] For example, ORIG-LOAD-DATE > 1616907600 or ORIG-LOAD-DATE > 20210328 will retrieve items added to Scopus after March 28, 2021 (regardless of publication date).  You can also AND a before and after filter together to get a date range. I've only seen this tip on a couple of pages, including this blog page ( https://christinaslisrant.scientopia.org/2014/04/29/se...