UX Caucus Database Tips

Written by Hilary Kraus and Zahra Premji Why is proximity searching valuable? In systematic searching, there is an inherent tension between sensitivity and precision. According to the Cochrane Handbook, "Searches for systematic reviews aim to be as extensive as possible in order to ensure that as many of the relevant studies as possible are included in the review. It is, however, necessary to strike a balance between striving for comprehensiveness and maintaining relevance when developing a search strategy." ( Chapter 4, Section 4.4.3: Sensitivity versus precision ) One strategy for achieving this balance is the use of proximity operators. As explained in the Cochrane Handbook's Technical Supplement to Chapter 4, "Use of proximity operators helps to ensure that searches are more sensitive than would be the case with direct adjacency or phrase searching, and can also facilitate ease of searching where there are multiple possible variations of a phrase which would othe...

Many thanks to Jocelyn Boice, Colorado State University Libraries for this week's post! This work is based on the author’s lightning talk “Tricky Truncation in ProQuest Databases” presented at the Medical Library Association UX Caucus’ event Favorite Features & Sneaky Solutions: A Database Tips Lightning Round on October 7, 2024. The Basics In the ProQuest interface, the asterisk truncation feature works in a different way than one might expect. Instead of returning results including any variant of a truncated word, it only includes variants with five letters or fewer after the root. This character limit has the potential to eliminate relevant results from a search rather than expanding the results set as one would anticipate. ProQuest’s documentation describes truncation with an asterisk as follows. "The truncation character in ProQuest is an asterisk (*) -- used to replace up to five characters [emphasis added]. For example, a search for farm* will retrieve documents w...

On October 7, 2024, the Medical Library Association's User Experience (UX) Caucus held a database tips lightning round. The event recording, chat transcript, presenter slide decks, and a summary of Q&A and tips culled from the chat can be found in the files section of the  UX Caucus' OSF site ! The presenters and their topics, with timestamps of when they appear in the video*, were: Methodology and Publication Type Filters in EBSCOhost Databases (00:40) Marilia Antunez, MA (LIS), MA,  Life & Allied Health Sciences Librarian, Associate Professor, The University of Akron (OH) Tricky Truncation in ProQuest Databases (07:15) Jocelyn Boice, Associate Professor / Collection Strategies and Data Analysis Librarian, Colorado State University Libraries Embase Query Translator (12:52) Molly Higgins, Systematic Review Librarian, USDA NESR What’s Included in Emtree’s /syn and /br (19:20) Amy Nadell, MSLIS, MA , AHIP-D, Librarian, Banner Health Fun with PMIDs (24:55) Jenni...

Proquest has recently changed the query syntax for combining "set" searching from the search history. To reference a previous query in the session, you now need to enclose the set reference in square brackets .  To combine my previous queries in the example below, I must use [S1] AND [S2] AND [S3] .

 ProQuest export limits got you down?  Did you know that ProQuest provides an export feature to help folks working on large literature review projects, like scoping reviews and systematic reviews, IF you (or your administrator) know about the setting!?  Administrators:  Log into the admin module and enable the option under the "User Interface" section:  Under the "My Research" section of the "Interface Settings, " you can enable the " Search results export functionality"  Searchers: Once the setting has been enabled, searchers will need to set up a " My Research" account to request a bulk export. After running your search while logged into your "My Research" account, you will see an "Export Results" button appear. Note: this only works for <10,000 results! recently increased to 20,000 results!     Don't forget to include "Abstracts "  The process for accessing the exported file is quite diff...