UX Caucus Database Tips

It’s alive! Or we wish it were. On June 16th, 2026, the Medical Library Association User Experience Caucus hosted the networking event, “Building a (Database) Creature with the Best Features”, at the Library Evidence Synthesis Services Symposium ( LESSS) .  During this event, more than sixty evidence synthesis librarians across disciplines assembled in an unscientific effort to cobble together their dream database platform based on the ones they search every day.

This post was updated on October 10, 2022 with new instructions for #3 under "For EndNote users..." For years, I kept hearing from colleagues that I should be searching Google Scholar as part of my systematic review projects. I didn't, for 3 reasons: I didn't know GS' search syntax GS notoriously does not allow bulk export to reference managers I didn't have a sense of how many results I should export.   Last fall, I finally said enough was enough and it was time to learn how to wrangle this beast. It turns out that there is now a third-party tool that facilitates bulk export from Google Scholar, Harzing's Publish or Perish . Here's how you get started: Download PoP for free Paste your query into the Keywords field Set your maximum number of results. I follow the guidelines on p. 135 of Wichor Bramer's dissertation , which is a great handbook for expert searching. Bramer suggests the first 200 results, or 100 if you are getting low numbers of res...