UX Caucus Database Tips

For evidence synthesis projects, it's critical for research teams to be in accord on eligibility criteria. I encourage my teams to perform a pilot screening of a subset of retrieved citations to identify where they may not agree before they undertake the formal screening process. This requires importing a sample of records to Covidence, our institutional evidence synthesis management tool.  The process I describe exports a random sample of records from an Ovid database to EndNote in order to convert the exported file to a compatible filetype (XML) for import to Covidence. Regardless of the reference and synthesis management tools you use, the steps I describe in Ovid remain the same. For pilot screening in Covidence, if I were to simply export the first 50 citations retrieved by a search, I may introduce selection bias.  According to Wolters Kluwer, owner of the Ovid platform, the last item added or updated in the database is the first displayed in the results when using Advan...

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...

A recent search project on "17β-hydroxysteroid dehydrogenase deficiency" inspired me to investigate how non-Latin characters are handled across various databases. This week we will look at how Ovid MEDLINE handles non-Latin and special characters using the following examples: 17β-HSD (17 beta-HSD) cáncer (Spanish for Cancer) سرطان (Arabic for Cancer) The help documentation wasn't in-depth enough for my needs so I reached out to Ruth Bernstein, a Tech Support team member at Wolters Kluwer, for further assistance. This post is based on our email exchange. Thanks, Ruth! If you attempt to run any of the above searches, you will get the following error message: 17β-HSD As indicated by the error message, special characters (such as β) are not searchable on Ovid . You will need to transliterate the Greek character and include it with the acronym spelled out, the full name of the substance, and the substance as a MeSH term.  17 beta HSD.mp. 277 17-Hydroxysteroid Dehydr...

Today's tip is from Rose Turner, rlt@pitt.edu, and her partner Tom Murphy VII . Rose writes,   I’m working on an Ovid SR and something that I’ve done is added a bookmark to my toolbar that resizes the Ovid query box. With the new interface the box is bigger, but it can still be annoying for me to resize to build or look at long strings. Example:   To add the bookmark: Right-click on your browser toolbar and select “Add Bookmark” (Firefox) or “Add page” (Chrome). Name the bookmark (ex, “Ovid Resize”) Add URL: javascript:document.getElementById('ovidclassic_focus').setAttribute('style', 'width:880px; height:200px'); You can customize the window size by changing the width and height numbers (mine are set to 880 by 200 px)   Now when you are working in Ovid you can just click your “Resize” bookmark to make the query box larger.     You can set it up to have as much space as you want.

Carrie Price recently contributed a tip about how to test for key article inclusion in PubMed . It's easy to do this on the Ovid platform as well: Ovid MEDLINE The syntax is a series of PMIDS combined with OR, nested in parentheses, and searched in the .ui. field (which is where PMIDs live in Ovid MEDLINE). The following example should retrieve 10 results: (12450163 or 15982428 or 27391569 or 27940902 or 28941542 or 29056764 or 31651628 or 31874458 or 32340564 or 32855234).ui. You'll notice Ovid automatically wraps each PMID in quotation marks: I have learned to sort the PMIDs in numeric order to make it easier to scan for and remove individual identifiers, which I often need to do during exploratory searching while the scope of the review question, as well as the inclusion and exclusion criteria, are still evolving.  Ovid Embase If you want to test your Embase strategy - never a bad idea - you can do the same by recycling this same string and changing the field to .pm., which ...