UX Caucus Database Tips

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...

ClinicalTrials.gov requires phrases be enclosed in quotation marks. Without quotes, it defaults to Boolean OR and finds any study that contains either word. For example,  placebo procedure  returns over 15,000 records, while  "placebo procedure" results in only 39 records.  A database requiring a phrase to be enclosed in quotation marks is commonplace. However, in ClinicalTrials.gov, smart quotes are not recognized as quotation marks. Many searchers, including myself, build searches in Microsoft Word, which defaults to autocorrecting plain (or straight) quotes (" ") to smart (or curly) quotes (‟ ”). In the example below, the first phrase uses straight quotes and the second phrase uses smart quotes: "placebo procedure"   “placebo procedure” If you copy and paste searches directly from Microsoft Word, it's most likely that your search will include smart quotes. ClinicalTrials.gov will ignore your smart quotes and treat your phrase as a Boolean OR.  In ...

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] .