UX Caucus Database Tips

 To search for an EXACT phrase in Scopus, you'll need to modify your phrases from using "double quotation marks" to {curly brackets}. Scopus uses both "Loose" and "Exact" phrases : "Exact To find documents that contain an exact phrase, enclose the phrase in braces : {oyster toadfish}. RESULT: This includes any stop words, spaces, and punctuation which you included in the braces. For example: {heart-attack} and {heart attack} will return different results because the dash is included.   Wildcards are searched as actual characters, e.g. {health care?} returns results such as: Who pays for health care? Loose Double quotation marks are important when searching for a loose/approximate phrase. Example: Loose phrase: TITLE-ABS-KEY( "heart attack") searches for documents where heart attack appear together in the title, abstract, or keywords.   Not a loose phrase: TITLE-ABS-KEY( heart attack) searches for documents where heart and attack...

(Tip submitted by Sandy Campbell ,  sandra.campbell@ualberta.ca ) From Sandy: In CINAHL, the searches present upside down (Set 1 at the bottom).  For publication, it is nice to have them right side up, to match the other searches in the appendix. If you click "Search ID#" at the top of the column, it reverses the order.  A little thing, but not obvious, and until someone showed me, I wasted a lot of time cutting and pasting lines into the reverse order.

 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...

Coauthored by Michelle R. Demetres, MLIS (mrd2006@med.cornell.edu) Update (October 18, 2022): This guidance is out of date, as bulk-tagging of large import sets in Covidence is currently not possible. Instead of importing references obtained by snowballing into the original Covidence project, we recommend creating a separate Covidence project for the new references and de-duplicating the already-screened references in EndNote prior to import. If you conduct snowballing (AKA citation searching or reference chasing) as part of your systematic review process, the PRISMA 2020 flow diagram  may be causing you headaches. In the new flow diagram, snowballed results are reported in the right hand side of the diagram, "Identification of studies via other methods." Michelle Demetres of the Samuel J. Wood Library at Weill Cornell Medicine has contributed this tip on how to track snowballed references in Covidence. The team must be completely finished with their first round of full tex...

UPDATE: Thanks to Layal Hneiny for the screenshots and instructions for Word (Office on the Web)!    Have you ever run into the "unsupported characters" error message in Ovid MEDLINE?     In more complex searches, it can be especially frustrating to pinpoint the exact character that isn't supported. This is a simple search example to highlight one common situation that will trigger this error message: Curly or Smart Quotes. At first glance, both of these phrases appear to be the same: “drug addiction”.ti,ab. OR "Substance Use Disorder".ti,ab. But upon closer inspection you can see that the quotation marks are slightly different: The drug phrase has curly or smart quotes around it and the substance phrase has straight quotes .    Ovid MEDLINE does not support the use of curly or smart quotes.    This is a simplified version of a search that hit my inbox last week. I was working with a faculty member in a shared Google doc. She had downloaded the ...

This tip was submitted by Kathryn Vanderboll (University of Michigan):  In Ovid MEDLINE, using adjacency with .kw. does not work the way you (probably) want - use .kf. instead! While searching (surg* adj (educat* or instruct* or learn* or teach* or train*)).kw., our team couldn't figure out why our sentinel article tagged with with the author supplied keyword "surgical teaching" wasn't showing up. Through trial and error, we learned that .kw. adjacency only works between lines . That is, how close keywords are to each other on different lines. For example, (surg* adj teach*).kw. picks up articles with keyword headings like:  But does NOT pick up articles that might have keyword headings like:   To use adjacency searching within a single keyword heading, you'll need to use .kf. The Ovid help documentation notes : "The Keyword Heading (KW) field contains the Keyword Headings assigned by authors. Keyword Headings are the author keywords. To retrieve every Key...

Depending on how an institution has adjusted their EBSCO database admin-level settings, the default search behavior may not work as expected. In this example, I'm highlighting CINAHL's Search Modes. You can adjust the Search Mode from the Advanced Search screen, toggling between "Boolean/Phrase" / "Find all my search terms" / "Find any of my search terms" / " SmartText Searching." My institution has "Boolean/Phrase" set as the default Search Mode.     This setting impacts the search results in a significant way, especially for novice users that may be less likely to add Boolean to a single search line.   Here you can see a simple three-word search S1 (ginger pregnancy nausea ) run in the "Boolean/Phrase" mode only returns 23 results. Most users would assume that the database would automatically AND the individual terms together, but in the "Boolean/Phrase" mode, this is not the case. For running multi...

 I recently sought help from colleagues on the expertsearching listserv  regarding puzzling results I was seeing in Embase (in this case, on the Ovid platform). I was searching for articles about the category of medical trainees known in the USA as residents. Here's the scope note for the EMTREE term "resident": (For screen reader users: The scope note cites the Dorland's definition, "a graduate and licensed physician receiving training in a specialty, usually in a hospital," and states this subject heading is synonymous with "interns and residents, resident doctor, resident physician, resident surgeon, surgery resident, surgical resident.") So far, so good, right? Well, here are the first 5 results for exp resident/ :  COVID-19 in French Nursing Homes during the Second Pandemic Wave: A Mixed-Methods Cross-Sectional Study COVID-19 vaccine effectiveness against laboratory confirmed symptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infection, COVID-19 related hospitalizations ...

This post was updated on October 10, 2022 with new instructions for #3 under "For EndNote users..." For years, I kept hearing from colleagues that I should be searching Google Scholar as part of my systematic review projects. I didn't, for 3 reasons: I didn't know GS' search syntax GS notoriously does not allow bulk export to reference managers I didn't have a sense of how many results I should export.   Last fall, I finally said enough was enough and it was time to learn how to wrangle this beast. It turns out that there is now a third-party tool that facilitates bulk export from Google Scholar, Harzing's Publish or Perish . Here's how you get started: Download PoP for free Paste your query into the Keywords field Set your maximum number of results. I follow the guidelines on p. 135 of Wichor Bramer's dissertation , which is a great handbook for expert searching. Bramer suggests the first 200 results, or 100 if you are getting low numbers of res...

Greetings, searchers! This blog is the home for a new initiative of the User Experience Caucus of the Medical Library Association : the Database Tip Sheets.  The Tip Sheets are bite-size tips for expert searchers on how to search more efficiently. If you'd like to contribute a tip or be added as a contributor to the blog, email Kate Saylor at: kmacdoug at umich.edu.