UX Caucus Database Tips

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! A quick and easy way to find PubMed citations linked to clinical studies in the ClinicalTrials.gov database is to use the Secondary Source ID field tag:   clinicaltrials.gov [si] [si] stands for stands for “secondary source ID,” and includes links to data discussed in PubMed citations. ClinicalTrials.gov is one of the data repositories included in this field. A complete list of databank sources can be found here: https://www.nlm.nih.gov/bsd/medline_databank_source.html To limit a PubMed search to citations with links to ClinicalTrials.gov, enter ClinicalTrials.gov [si] followed by your search term(s). For example, to find registered clinical trials utilizing virtual reality, enter the following in the search box: clinicaltrials.gov [si] virtual reality For example, this result from the above search...   ...is linked to this ...

This week's helpful tip was inspired by a tweet from @JReynoldsMLIS (who credited Carol Lefebvre as the original source for the tip). Thanks to you both!   How does adjacency work in Ovid MEDLINE? According to the help documentation : The Adjacent operator (ADJ) retrieves records with search terms next to each other in that specific order ( I did not know this!* ). You do not need to separate search terms manually by inserting ADJ between them, because when you separate terms with a space on the command line, Ovid automatically searches for the terms adjacent to one another. blood pressure  =  blood adj pressure pressure blood =/= blood pressure 😱   *Order matters in adj, not adj#     **Seriously, I didn't realize Ovid did this!! You can also define a specific range of adjacency by adding a number (1-99) to the adj operator.  ADJ1     Next to each other, in any order* ADJ2     Next to each other, in any order,...

Do you long for the good old days of Legacy PubMed's Search Details URL generator to share long searches with your teams? In new PubMed, you can share a search by copying the URL from the results page, like this: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=%22breast+cancer%22+AND+%22health+literacy%22     BUT , if you try to share a longer search, the URL string is translated into a query key like this "longquery9a58987564a53ee81e0" which generates a URL that is not stable or sharable: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=longquery1a04c83244bc853b315a To get around this longquery issue, you can simply add this https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term= to the front of your search string, then copy/paste the entire string into the address bar: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term= ("Meditation"[Mesh] OR meditat*[tiab] OR Koan[tiab] OR Samadhi[tiab]) OR ("Mental Healing"[Mesh] OR "mental healing"[tiab] OR "Emmanuel movement"[tiab] OR "he...

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 ...

This week's tip is brought to you by the brilliant SRLibrarianProblems Twitter account:        What the heck is lemmatization (lemmatisation)? And why is it important to consider for sensitive (yet precise) searches? Lemmatization is a feature in many databases (we will demonstrate other examples in later blog posts) that attempts to make a relatively simple keyword search more robust (sensitive) behind the scenes. In the SRLibrarianProblems tweet above, you can see that their example shows that the Topic keyword search for aging with and without quotes produces significantly different results. So what is going on between the two versions of this simple search? According to the Web of Science help documentation : "Web of Science automatically applies lemmatization rules to search queries. Lemmatization reduces inflected forms of a word to their lexical root. With lemmatization turned on, a search term is reduced to its "lemma" and inflected forms of the word are...

Update: Ovid shared an announcement about upcoming changes to the Open Access panel discussed in this posted. "We're pleased to announce a release to the new Ovid UI on 24 May 2023 at 6 AM EDT (view your local time). In this release we're removing the orange Open Access panel that appears on the right side of Basic Search and making updates to the display of error messages. The decision to remove the Open Access panel is the result of years of very low usage. We found that our users perceive this panel as if it were an advert because it displays on the page as adverts do on other websites. Through Links@Ovid and Ovid LinkSolver, we continue to link users to available Open Access Electronic Full Text articles ." ------------------------------------------------------------ This post was inspired by a January 2021 thread on the expertsearching email list from Roxanne Isard BA, BEd, MLIS, Teaching and Learning Librarian (Western University). Ovid MEDLINE provides a uniq...

This tip was submitted by Carrie Price (Towson University) Do you want to test your search for key article inclusion? Perhaps the review team supplied you with a list of key articles during the reference interview. Or, maybe you did some searching together and identified relevant articles. Typically, these key articles are articles that should appear in the search, and can be a useful building block for term harvesting.  Once the key articles have been identified, grab the PubMed ID number (PMID) from the item record and paste them into a document. For an example, I'll use a set of articles on pulmonary rehabilitation in cystic fibrosis patients. I've chosen five. Give each PMID a field tag of [uid], "unique identifier." 33618051 [uid] OR 30827470 [uid] OR 29045949 [uid] OR 27320420 [uid] OR 26522923 [uid] Run them to make sure you get the correct results. It's really easy to miss part of a PMID! Now, keep this key article set in your search documentation while...