UX Caucus Database Tips

  Guest post by Erika Lake,  erica-lake@uiowa.edu The National Library of Medicine is pleased to announce proximity search capabilities have been added to PubMed. This means you can now search for multiple terms appearing in any order within a specified distance of one another in the [Title] or [Title/Abstract] fields. You’ll find details on how to build a proximity search as well as examples in the new NLM Technical Bulletin article, PubMed Update: Proximity Search Now Available in PubMed . You can also check out the newly added “Proximity Searching” section of the PubMed User Guide here: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/help/#proximity-searching Finally, NLM’s Office of Education and Training and NCBI have assembled a Quick Tour introducing users to the basics of Proximity Searching, which can be found via this direct link . This tour has also been added to the PubMed Trainer’s Toolkit . Have fun exploring, and email Erica Lake at erica-lake@uiowa.edu to let her know what y...

Today's tip is from Rose Turner, rlt@pitt.edu, and her partner Tom Murphy VII . Rose writes,   I’m working on an Ovid SR and something that I’ve done is added a bookmark to my toolbar that resizes the Ovid query box. With the new interface the box is bigger, but it can still be annoying for me to resize to build or look at long strings. Example:   To add the bookmark: Right-click on your browser toolbar and select “Add Bookmark” (Firefox) or “Add page” (Chrome). Name the bookmark (ex, “Ovid Resize”) Add URL: javascript:document.getElementById('ovidclassic_focus').setAttribute('style', 'width:880px; height:200px'); You can customize the window size by changing the width and height numbers (mine are set to 880 by 200 px)   Now when you are working in Ovid you can just click your “Resize” bookmark to make the query box larger.     You can set it up to have as much space as you want.

This week's tip comes to us from Paije Wilson , MLIS Health Sciences Librarian at the Ebling Library. She credits the Systematic Reviews, Scoping Reviews, and other Knowledge Syntheses guide from McGill Library as the original source for the tip. You can filter results in Scopus by date added to the database . I've found this handy when researchers want everything added to a database after or before a specific date, regardless of when the items were published. ORIG-LOAD-DATE > [insert Unix time without brackets or year month day] ORIG-LOAD-DATE < [insert Unix time without brackets or year month day] For example, ORIG-LOAD-DATE > 1616907600 or ORIG-LOAD-DATE > 20210328 will retrieve items added to Scopus after March 28, 2021 (regardless of publication date).  You can also AND a before and after filter together to get a date range. I've only seen this tip on a couple of pages, including this blog page ( https://christinaslisrant.scientopia.org/2014/04/29/se...

This week's tip is another contribution from our colleague Sandy Campbell  and her colleagues at the University of Alberta. Sandy writes: I don't think I sent you this one. It is another CINAHL weirdness. When I search Matis (which is the name of an Indigenous people), the first three results returned are "mates", but the 4th is MATIS. That one isn't the right subject, but you can see that it has interpreted the term matis as mates, as well as matis. It took me a while to figure out why when I was searching for South American Indigenous people, I got a paper on African rhinoscerous mates. "Matis" brings up 98 results. That should be enough to return a unique search. If you search Germa, it asks if you want to search Germa or Germany, but it doesn't do that with Matis So in my South American search hedge, I've ended up putting quotes around every term, just to be sure. Here are the numbers of  results returned by Sandy's search terms...

 A few years ago I ran into a search quirk when translating a lengthy search from PubMed to Ovid MEDLINE. My Ovid results were significantly larger and it wasn't immediately obvious what was happening. After much testing and consulting with my colleagues (thanks, Mark MacEachern !), we finally pinned it down to a single MeSH term returning vastly different results between the two platforms .   Ovid - exp Food/ 1,428,580 results PubMed - "Food"[Mesh] 701,490 results We figured out what was causing the difference, but there was nothing in the help documentation that explained why it was happening. Even though the searches appeared to be the same, both MeSH terms were exploded, the platforms appeared to be handling them differently. I had to reach out to Ovid to get an answer for my remaining question. Over the course of a few weeks and many emails, they were finally able to provide a clear explanation: Ovid was including “Drug Terms” in the explode, where PubMed was not...

ETA: Many thanks to Whitney Townsend for being a second set of eyes to check my testing strategies! Building on our earlier post, Tip #25: Using Subheadings in PubMed , here are some more fun things to know about PubMed's subheadings...  Did you know that PubMed's subheadings have their own hierarchy? You can see the full list of Subheadings categories in the MeSH database . And just like you find with other MeSH terms, PubMed also automatically explodes subheadings.  For example, when you search "Blood Glucose/analysis"[Mesh] , you are getting all of the relevant lower-level subheadings under "analysis" [Subheading].  This MeSH and subheading combo includes: "Blood Glucose/ analysis "[Mesh] "Blood Glucose/ blood "[Mesh] "Blood Glucose/ isolation and purification "[Mesh] "Blood  Glucose/ cerebrospinal fluid "[Mesh] In the screenshot below, you can see that ORing the other subheadings in doesn't increase or chang...

 This week's tip is a quick and easy one, but it can save you loads of time when skimming PubMed results for relevance. Did you know that you can adjust PubMed's display settings from your My NCBI account? Things like highlighting can help you efficiently skim through results to find your keywords of interest, and expanding the abstracts can help save you the time of clicking on every title to view the article details. " My NCBI " is a tool that allows users to set up a profile to manage preferences and services (collections, saved searches, My Bibliography, custom filters, etc.) for several NCBI databases, including PubMed. Step 1: Set up your My NCBI account Start here to create your My NCBI account. From the " My NCBI Help " documentation:  "There are multiple options to sign in to a My NCBI account: using a username and password associated with an eRA account or an NIH account, or using a username and password associated with a partner organization...

What is a Subheading? Subheadings allow searchers to improve the precision of a search that uses controlled vocabulary by further focusing on a narrower aspect of the topic. Here's an example of how subheadings (or qualifiers) are displayed for an indexed article in PubMed. Subheadings (highlighted in red) appear to the right of a slash following the Medical Subject Heading (MeSH). How to Use Subheadings in PubMed To build a PubMed search using subheadings, you have a few different options depending on the type of search you need. You can start from the MeSH database to build a search using Medical Subject Headings with subheadings applied. Find the MeSH term of interest, then from the record page you can select various subheadings that are relevant to that topic, and click "Add to search builder" to create the search. Click "Search PubMed" to run your search.     In the PubMed searches below, you'll see that the search with the " surgery " subhe...

The UX Caucus, formally known as "Features & Flaws", launched a Google form Issues Tracker in early 2019 to help information professionals report and communicate usability problems with electronic resources. Our goals for the tracker included improving communication between information professionals and vendors; better-informed licensing decisions; and ultimately, better interfaces for all searchers. The initial version of this tracker also included an automatically generated analytics view that displayed aggregated form submission data.  In order to expand the tracker's audience, the MLA launched a pilot in early 2020 , where users were encouraged to not only submit UX issues, but also provide any feedback or suggestions to improve the tracking tool. After a period of about 6 months, we received nearly 40 issue submissions and some fantastic feedback to make the tool easier to use. Based on the pilot feedback, the UX Caucus team launched a revamped Issues Tracker ...

 Many thanks to Erica Lake (Outreach Coordinator, NNLM Region 6 ), and Amanda Sawyer and Jessica Chan from the NCBI PubMed team for this week's tip! Why is there a phrase index? The PubMed database contains more than 34 million citations and abstracts of biomedical literature and is growing by more than 1 million citations each year. PubMed uses a phrase index to provide efficient, cost-effective phrase searching while preserving system speed and performance for its 3.4+ million daily visitors. How does the phrase index work? Many phrases are automatically recognized by the subject translation table used in PubMed's Automatic Term Mapping (ATM ). For example, if you enter fever of unknown origin without enclosing it in double quotes, PubMed recognizes this phrase as a MeSH Term. You can bypass ATM and search for a specific phrase using the following formats: Enclose the phrase in double quotes: "kidney allograft" If you use quotes and the phrase is not found in the ph...