UX Caucus Database Tips

 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...

 This week's tip is brought to us by Ursula Ellis from the University of British Columbia. She credits her colleague Mathew Vis-Dunbar for coming up with this solution! Thanks to you both! "If you search for an exact phrase which contains a stopword in Ovid, the stopword will be ignored and other words will be searched in the order entered, within 2 words of each other. For instance, line 1 of this search finds "treatment and prevention," "treatment or prevention," etc, but not "prevention and treatment" which is found by line 2: This is not ideal for many phrases in which the stopword is a critical piece of the search phrase. There are two options to solve this issue in Ovid. One is to get in touch with your rep and ask them to turn off "runtime stopword processing," as described here: https://wkhealth.force.com/ ovidsupport/s/article/ Stopwords-and-phrase- searching-in-Ovid-databases However, for large institutions, it i...

 To search for an EXACT phrase in Scopus, you'll need to modify your phrases from using "double quotation marks" to {curly brackets}. Scopus uses both "Loose" and "Exact" phrases : "Exact To find documents that contain an exact phrase, enclose the phrase in braces : {oyster toadfish}. RESULT: This includes any stop words, spaces, and punctuation which you included in the braces. For example: {heart-attack} and {heart attack} will return different results because the dash is included.   Wildcards are searched as actual characters, e.g. {health care?} returns results such as: Who pays for health care? Loose Double quotation marks are important when searching for a loose/approximate phrase. Example: Loose phrase: TITLE-ABS-KEY( "heart attack") searches for documents where heart attack appear together in the title, abstract, or keywords.   Not a loose phrase: TITLE-ABS-KEY( heart attack) searches for documents where heart and attack...

UPDATE: Thanks to Layal Hneiny for the screenshots and instructions for Word (Office on the Web)!    Have you ever run into the "unsupported characters" error message in Ovid MEDLINE?     In more complex searches, it can be especially frustrating to pinpoint the exact character that isn't supported. This is a simple search example to highlight one common situation that will trigger this error message: Curly or Smart Quotes. At first glance, both of these phrases appear to be the same: “drug addiction”.ti,ab. OR "Substance Use Disorder".ti,ab. But upon closer inspection you can see that the quotation marks are slightly different: The drug phrase has curly or smart quotes around it and the substance phrase has straight quotes .    Ovid MEDLINE does not support the use of curly or smart quotes.    This is a simplified version of a search that hit my inbox last week. I was working with a faculty member in a shared Google doc. She had downloaded the ...