Librarians’ Rx

It’s been almost 5 months since our University has been using the OvidSP interface exclusively. I’d have to say that reaction has been mixed. I find myself waffling over whether I love or hate the basic search more often than I care to admit. I tend to hate it when I’m helping someone on the reference desk, and I see that they’re getting 0 hits because they’re using the Basic Search the same way they use the Advanced Ovid Search. Or even worse, they’re doing parts of the same search in both the Basic Search and the Advanced Ovid Search. This brings up a larger question about whether it’s appropriate to have two search interfaces that physically look the same but do not work the same way. Is it realistic to expect users to work by 2 sets of rules?

Anyway, I’ve come up with some basic hints to understanding the Basic Search:

• It’s not a quick search. You can’t put in a query and have the database search every field looking for your terms.
• You cannot use the searching tricks we normally use. This means:

• No Boolean
• No truncation
• No combining searches
• No parentheses
• Also, searching in to other languages seems to be problematic, which is an issue if you’re doing a search in Pascal.

• It doesn’t search every word in your search string. This makes it better than google in a lot of ways, because it’s smart enough to recognize that only relevant terms should be searched. For example, it will only search the underlined terms in the following query and will ignore the rest:

Is there an effective treatment for hepatitis B in children

To see the terms that are being searched just check the Search Aid box on the left of the results.

This is important because there are noise words that aren’t searched at all. A few of these are: policy, condition, related. Obviously, this could cause some serious problems for certain searches.

• Limited results. The first time you do a search in OVID SP you may get thrown for a loop because there will only be around 500 results, even when you do a search where there is a lot of literature. Don’t worry; the database is designed to retrieve around 500 results since most people don’t bother looking beyond the first few pages of search results.
• Relevancy ranking. OVID SP ranks results based on relevancy. Relevancy is determined by the number of terms found in the record (it’s important to remember that this doesn’t necessarily mean the number of terms in your query, but just the number of terms it actually searched for), where the terms appear in the record, whether the actual query term was found or if a related term was found, number, frequency, and proximity of concepts in the record. Don’t forget that you can re-sort results based on a number of different parameters if so desired.
• Combining searches. Do not do the usual thing where you search for one concept, then search for another concept, and then combine the searches. This does NOT work. Here’s an example of what the problem is:

I searched for diabetes. I retrieved 515 articles.

I searched for retinopathy. I retrieved 565 articles.

I combined the two searches and only retrieved 1 article.

This happens because each search only pull the most relevant articles. So in actual fact, there are around 45 000 articles indexed with the MeSH Diabetes Mellitus, but in the basic search I only retrieved 515 of these. Just like there are a lot more articles on retinopathy than the 565 I retrieved.

So when the searches are combined you’re only combining small portions of citations dealing with your subjects.

The solution is to combine terms in the same query. You need to do a one line search. When I did this, I retrieved 652 articles.

• Related Terms allows for searching of synonymous terms in a query. So instead of searching therapy or cure or treatment the database will search all of those terms at the same time. It works fantastically some of the time, and not that well a lot of the time. According to OVID the related terms are evolved from the Unified Medical Language System meta thesaurus, medical dictionaries & thesauri, medical acronyms, drug and disease names, and American and British dictionaries. So if you put in a term like therapy, you get a lot of relevant related terms. But if you put in smoking, the only related term is smokings (not cigarette or tobacco addiction). If you use the term obese, there are no related terms identified, although there are a lot of related terms for obesity. I wish this worked better. It’s also strange that the related terms don’t usually include relevant MeSH headings such as the ones you’d be mapped to in the Advanced Ovid Search.

So basically if you’re a librarian you may have difficulty with the basic search, because you won’t be able to use you’re normal searching tricks. Also, if you’re a student you may have difficulty because you won’t be able to search for an author’s name or a journal title in the basic search. You’ll need to search in the Find Citation section of the interface or do an Advanced Ovid Search. But overall, the ability to communicate with a database as though you were talking to a colleague is pretty amazing, as long as you know what it can and cannot do.

–Thane

Both Dagmara and I are new librarians. We have been really lucky to be involved in systematic review searching this year. This has been an overwhelming and scary (at times) but (in the end) rewarding learning process.

At first we were freaked out because we really were not sure of the process involved in systematic review searching, or if there even was a process. I was under the impression that you had to retrieve every single piece of information ever written (in any format) on your topic. I wasn’t aware that the search itself needs to be systematic and needs to fulfill criteria related to the research questions being answered by the systematic review.

We were both lucky enough to work with librarians who held our hands, encouraged us, and walked us through this process. There is no way we would have been able to complete our searches without the help of Marlene Dorgan and Jeanette Buckingham.

Along the way, we discovered that there are a few key elements involved in systematic review searching:

1. Understanding how citations are indexed and how abstracts are written makes the process a lot easier.
2. Make sure to take a look at the search strategies used by other systematic reviews on your topic. This will give you a good starting point for terms you can use in your search.
3. You need to set up a relationship with the researchers you’re doing the search for. You need to have them outline what exactly they’re trying to find, and have them go through potentially relevant query terms with you. This is especially true if you’re conducting a search on something you know nothing about (which often happens).
4. There’s no shame in asking for help. Your search will be better if you have another librarian look at it and give you feedback.
5. It’s interesting that each librarian seems to have a particular searching style. I don’t know if there’s a completely right way to search or not. For sure, there are wrong ways to conduct a search. But the different approaches taken by individual librarians towards a search are interesting, which is probably why asking for feedback and help is so useful.
6. Your first search is always the hardest. Once you have a good search done, replicating the search in other databases is fairly straightforward.
7. If you don’t like searching and understanding how databases work, then you probably shouldn’t even attempt to do a systematic review.

We found some helpful advice and instructions on systematic reviews from the following sources:

• Khan K, Kunz R, Kleijnen J, Antes G. Systematic reviews to support evidence-based medicine: how to review and apply findings of healthcare research.
• For a succinct overview of systematic review searching please see this article from the UBC Health Library Wiki. At the bottom of the article are some great links.
• Here’s some general information on finding studies for systematic reviews from the Centre for Reviews and Dissemination.
• And of course BestBETS has some great information on using search filters.

I normally try not to post about stuff that comes out on Canmed-lib, but I thought this was sufficiently important that it warranted an additional post. The National Network of Libraries for Health/Réseau national des bibliothèques pour la santé task force has the go ahead from Canada Health Infoway for the Phase 0 stage of a Virtual Health Library (VHL) project. Once it is established, the library will eventually “ensure that health care providers across the country have easy and equitable access to the best information for patient care.”

See the announcement that went out over the Canmed-lib listserv for more information.

The History of Medicine division of the National Library of Medicine has a new exhibit about medicine and magic in Harry Potter, displaying old treasures in the library’s collection that are mentioned in the series of books. I won’t be going to Maryland before the end of November, but if I were going I’d check it out!

For more information: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/news/harry_potter_exhibit07.html

The Cochrane Library database is being upgraded to Issue 3, 2007 today. New content will include close to 9700 new records downloaded from MEDLINE, specialised registers, and handsearch results.

Click here for more information about changes in content.

An interactive program, Turning the Pages offers viewers the chance to leaf through rare books from the National Library of Medicine collection.

Click here to read information about the recent launch.

The latest, 2006 impact factors are now available via the Journal Citation Reports database.

The latest upgrade to TRIP has gone live! Added features include brief snippets of articles in the results list (often a sentence from the conclusion), a supposedly enhanced advanced search function, the ability to comment on the quality and applicability of articles, and RSS feeds for searches.

For a more complete description, check out the TRIP blog.

OK. So there are a ton of medical, library, and medical library blogs out there, and I’m sure you, the readers of this one, read several others as well. My question to you, is what types of posts would you like to see on Librarians’ Rx? What information or updates are you most interested in learning about? Please leave me a comment with your suggestions, and hopefully I can gear the future of the site so that it meets your (and the rest of its user base’s) needs.

Thanks in advance for your input!

Speaking of Partnership: the Canadian Journal of Library and Information Practice and Research, the latest issue of the journal is now available online. Included among the articles is one by Pearl Jacobson entitled “Empowering the physician-patient relationship: The effect of the Internet” which discusses the librarian’s role in mediating the exchange of information between physicians and patients. Patients increasingly turn to the Internet for health information, but are often hesitant to discuss the information they find with their practitioner. Librarians can assist the patients in understanding the information they locate, thereby enabling them to take part in a shared and informed decision-making process with their physician.