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.

Written by Hilary Kraus and Zahra Premji  Take a walk on the wild side! Join us for a deep dive into the world of wildcards. This post provides an introduction to how wildcards work, some potential  pitfalls  of using them, and detailed information about how to use them in many popular database platforms. Wildcards 101 Complex searching often involves looking for various forms and spellings of a word. One common approach to this is the use of wildcards. There are two varieties of wildcard. A mandatory wildcard replaces one letter; an optional wildcard replaces either zero or one letter. How these wildcards function and what syntax is used to operationalize them depends on where you're searching. In this post, we look at the ways commonly used databases (or database platforms) use wildcards. Going forward, we will use root to refer to a collection of Latin alphabet letters to which a wildcard may be applied. Since wildcards are typically executed using a punctuation mar...

As a librarian, a common part of my job is to generate reports for departments on their publication outputs. Namely, this consists of creating a PubMed (or sometimes Scopus) search based on a list of names provided to me by the department. After a few years of these requests, I've been able to compile some insights, and, perhaps most importantly, shortcuts to speed up the process in PubMed.  As a note, I will only be discussing generating the author names search string, and not how to structure affiliation search strings (which is a whole other can of worms!). Basic structure of a PubMed author name search Author searches in PubMed are structured as last name followed by initials (e.g., Wilson P[au] OR Wilson PJ[au] ). PubMed automatically applies truncation to the last initial in the name without the need for truncation (in fact, using truncation with an author name can cause issues with the search, as discussed in the following section). This automatic truncation feature he...

Many thanks to Marijane White for this week's post!  Introducing the Pairwise PubMed Search Generator! The Pairwise PubMed Search Generator is a tool designed to streamline the creation of complex PubMed search strings. By using two lists of input terms, you can quickly generate search queries that can either be copied to your clipboard or launched directly in PubMed with a single click. This tool can save you thousands of keystrokes and help prevent errors in intricate search constructions.   Continue reading to learn more about PubMed’s pairwise search functionality, a brief overview of pairwise combinatorics, and of course, the tool itself. PubMed’s proximity search functionality The National Library of Medicine announced the addition of long-awaited proximity search capability to PubMed in the fall of 2022 . Initially only available in the Title and Title/Abstract fields, it was later made available for the Affiliation field as well, where it also limits the search to i...

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...

On February 19, 2025, the Medical Library Association's User Experience (UX) Caucus held its second database tips lightning round. The event recording, chat transcript, and slide decks 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: Sneaky Solution: Searching for Articles on Ethical Values (05:40) Lorraine Porcello, MSLIS, MSIM, Position Title: Lead Librarian, Health Sciences  RSS Feeds for Librarians: Tracking Subtopics and Trends (18:59) Esther Garcia, Senior Health Science Librarian, Texas Woman’s University Using Ovid's Basic Search Function to Build Search Strategies (34:58) Bronwyn Sutherland, Liaison Librarian, Texas Medical Center Library Quotations Around Single-Word Terms in PubMed (46:07) Jules Bailey, Health Sciences Librarian, Florida State University Libraries Special Characters in PubMed (59:23) [apologies, no closed captions for this presentation]  K...

Many thanks to Jules Bailey, Health Sciences Librarian at Florida State University Libraries, for this week's tip! As librarians and search experts, we are all accustomed to "phrase searching" where putting two or more words together in "quotation marks" looks for those words together in that order in the search results rather than separately anywhere in an article or other resource. However, we don’t typically expect that adding quotation marks versus leaving them off would make a difference for single-word terms, as can be seen here in an example from Embase. Result #1 shows how Embase translates a search for discrimination typed into the basic search box—it yields results for the Emtree term ‘discrimination’/exp or the plain keyword. Embase also shows ‘single quotations’ in the search history, regardless of whether the typed-in search used those or "double quotations". In short, Embase yields the same number of results for a single-word term with an...