UX Caucus Database Tips

What is a PMID? A PMID, also known as the PubMed Identifier, is a unique number assigned by the National Library of Medicine to all records included in PubMed. It appears under the citation information on each record. PMIDs do not change over time or during processing and are never reused. Searching for articles using their PMIDs can be a very efficient way to find known items or test searches (e.g., Testing for Article Inclusion in Ovid and Testing for Articles in PubMed ). To search for a set of known records in PubMed, enter a string of PMIDs in the search box without the Boolean "OR" and without the [pmid] field tag. If you use [pmid], you will need to use the Boolean "OR" to combine them. These three searches return the same results: 26104772 11038025 35106283 26104772 OR 11038025 OR 35106283 26104772[pmid] OR 11038025[pmid] OR 35106283[pmid] Below we will highlight some search tips for finding PMIDs across various databases Too long didn't read (tldr) c...

In previous posts, we showed you how to test your searches for inclusion of key articles in PubMed and in Ovid databases . You can recycle your PMID strings to create test sets for other databases, too! I search Web of Science for virtually every SR or scoping review I do, so I usually recycle my list of PMIDs. Here's the syntax: PMID=(12450163 or 15982428 or 27391569 or 27940902 or 28941542 or 29056764 or 31651628 or 31874458 or 32340564 or 32855234) While this list contains 10 PMIDs, only 6 of them are indexed in Web of Science. I need to keep track of how many records the string retrieves in Web of Science the same way I would in MEDLINE. For non-MEDLINE articles, you can use DOIs with the following syntax: DO=(10.1182/blood-2020-143231 OR 10.1093/jac/dkaa016 OR 10.1016/j.jadohealth.2019.11.163 OR 10.1089/trgh.2018.0061 OR 10.1093/ofid/ofz360.2167 OR 10.1016/j.apmr.2019.10.050 OR 10.1177/0333102419859835 OR 10.1111/head.13549 OR 10.1212/CPJ.0000000000000401 OR 10.1080/01658107....

Carrie Price recently contributed a tip about how to test for key article inclusion in PubMed . It's easy to do this on the Ovid platform as well: Ovid MEDLINE The syntax is a series of PMIDS combined with OR, nested in parentheses, and searched in the .ui. field (which is where PMIDs live in Ovid MEDLINE). The following example should retrieve 10 results: (12450163 or 15982428 or 27391569 or 27940902 or 28941542 or 29056764 or 31651628 or 31874458 or 32340564 or 32855234).ui. You'll notice Ovid automatically wraps each PMID in quotation marks: I have learned to sort the PMIDs in numeric order to make it easier to scan for and remove individual identifiers, which I often need to do during exploratory searching while the scope of the review question, as well as the inclusion and exclusion criteria, are still evolving.  Ovid Embase If you want to test your Embase strategy - never a bad idea - you can do the same by recycling this same string and changing the field to .pm., which ...