Issue 16 of the digest contains news of very significant changes to Ovid Embase, a correction to last issue's piece on PubMed and Ovid MEDLINE and a new resource you might like to dip into. Contact the team at cis-support@cochrane.org.
Changes to Ovid Embase
New features coming to Ovid Embase
Ovid Embase is undergoing a major reload in September. Changes will include:
Upload of the 2016 thesaurus tool (for more information, see here)
Emtree display will now include the full information provided by Elsevier, including the history note
Updates to date fields
16 new fields (including PMID, author email, grant information)
4 changed fields
Ability to locate MEDLINE records by PMID
Among the changed fields will be "date delivered", which has implications for searching for updates. They say: "The Date Created (DC) field will now contain the date on which the original Citation & Abstract file was created in Embase by Elsevier. It will now contain the date that was previously labeled as Date Delivered (DD) because Date Created (DC) is a more accurate label for this date. Customers who wish to use the date closest to when articles were delivered to Ovid should use the Date Delivered (DD) field within their Saved searches and Autoalerts. For clarity, older records will reflect these date changes as well."
Correction: differences between PubMed and Ovid MEDLINE
Confirmation from Ovid on differences between PubMed and Ovid MEDLINE
Maria-Inti Metzendorf contacted us after the last digest, where we looked at whether searching Ovid MEDLINE and PubMed were the same thing. We advised using the syntax (publisher[sb] OR oldmedline[sb]) to find records on PubMed which might not be included in the Ovid version of MEDLINE.
However, Maria-Inti told us that the subset "oldmedline [sb]" is no longer available in PubMed, although this has not been reflected in PubMed help file. Old MEDLINE records have now been fully indexed according to their technical bulletin - read more about what was done here.
We contacted Ovid to find out exactly what is now searched when you choose to search “Epub Ahead of Print, In-Process & Other Non-Indexed Citations, Ovid MEDLINE(R) Daily and Ovid MEDLINE(R) 1946 to Present”. Ovid Support have confirmed that if you choose this option, you will now be searching all of PubMed content, minus one day.
Ovid have also sent us this video looking at the ePub ahead of Print segment, which may be of interest.
Useful resource
Did you know about SuRe Info?
If you want to keep up with the latest research in information retrieval, you might be interested in SuRe Info. It's a web resource that provides research-based information relating to the information retrieval aspects of producing systematic reviews and health technology assessments. SuRe Info seeks to help information specialists stay up-to-date with the latest developments by providing easy access to current methods papers, and support more research-based information retrieval practice.
The website has two sections:
Information on general search methods common across all health technologies;
Methods to use when searching for specific aspects of health technologies (mainly based on the structure of the HTA Core Model® developed by EUnetHTA)
Articles contain a summary of research, followed by a list of articles which you can explore in more depth.
CRS Web update
Early adopters and CRS Web
More early adopters have started to use CRS Web, with further users expected to come on board over the next few weeks. If you are interested in joining them, contact us at cis-support@cochrane.org. Please note that at this time, some advanced features of the CRS (for example tracking and studification) have not yet been rolled out, so at the moment we are only looking for users who use the basic features, such as searching and publishing to CENTRAL. If this is you, and you have time to help us to test the system, let us know!
Contact us...
Don't forget, previous editions of the Cochrane Information Specialist Support Team digest are available on the CIS Portal (Archie login required)
Contact the Support Team for help with any Cochrane Information Specialist related issue (including CRS technical support): cis-support@cochrane.org
The Cochrane Information Specialist Support Team:
Liz Doney I Sam Faulkner I Ruth Foxlee
Anne Littlewood I Doug Salzwedel
