UX Caucus Database Tips

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...

Many thanks to Peter Johnson, University of Kansas Medical Center, @libraryvines@mindly.social for this week's post!  Within PubMed's Advanced Search query builder, terms may be attached to specific field tags, such as [MeSH] or [mh], and then applied to an ongoing string in the query box with specific boolean. Queries generated in this manner will appear without quotations around the entered terms. Ex. This non-application of quotations gives several considerations to an advanced searcher utilizing the query builder tool in PubMed.  Depending on the field tag used, an unquoted word or phrase may have automatic term mapping (ATM) applied to it. This can produce unexpected search results from the mapping, particularly for an unquoted term searched with the MeSH field tag where the mapping may apply to a MeSH's entry terms. The possibility ATM on an unquoted phrase attached to a field tag should be noted in each individual field tag's documentation .   A se...