HAPI provides information on measurement scales, tests and checklists
(henceforth referred to as “instruments”) in health and psychology. The University of Leicester has access to itthrough Ovid.
Ovid’s own database guide is a thorough guide to the search
fields and limits. This post attempts to be a basic
introduction to searching HAPI.
Ovid’s usual search syntax applies. A search with no field name appended is
carried out in the title (of the scale or of the article being indexed), source
(the article being indexed), acronym, descriptors, measure descriptors, sample
descriptors and abstract.
Measure descriptors describe what the instrument measures,
for example brain injuries or behaviour.
Sample descriptors describe the people to whom the
instrument is administered, for example infants, head injuries.
Descriptors are taken from the Thesaurus of Psychological
Index Terms and MeSH but not every reference seems to have them.
If you look at the Complete Reference, you will see a field “Reference”,
which is where the instrument being used in the reference indexed in HAPI was
published. That reference may not be the
first publication of the instrument, and may itself not be indexed in HAPI.
These fields can be searched using usual Ovid syntax, so
coma.md. searches the Measure descriptor field. A
full list of field codes is in Ovid’s database guide. There are others including Validity and Number
of Questions.
There are limit tick boxes for Primary Source and Secondary
Source.
Primary Source is not always
the original published source of the instrument. But it is a source that contains the
instrument. A Secondary Source is a
source that does not contain the instrument, but which describes how the instrument
is used, and has some level of detail, including perhaps some questions.
So, Secondary Source will not find every article that has ever
used the instrument. To do that, you would
need to use another database, perhaps Medline, using the name of the instrument
as a freetext search (and that would not find everything), or Web of Science or
Scopus, for articles that cite the reference of the original source.
As well as Primary and Secondary source, there are Review
Source (articles that review instruments), Compendium Source (things like
Mental Measurements Yearbook) and Translated Source (if you need a translation
of an instrument). These are under
Limits > Additional Limits.
Example searches
A search for Neonatal Behavioral Assessment Scale (devised
by T. Berry Brazelton, who passed away recently)
finds 37 results. One is a Primary
Source, which is an article from 1981 which uses, and presumably lists, the scale. 32 are Secondary Sources. Some, at least, in both categories, give a
reference to the original publication in 1973. However, the remaining four include the
Mental Measurements Yearbook, which gives details of the 3rd edition
of the scale itself. So, the reference
in the HAPI item may not be the latest version of the instrument.
A search for Glasgow Coma Scale finds 334 items. 10 are primary sources, some of which are
variants of the scale. Some at least
reference the original publication, as well as the source indexed for
HAPI. 81 of the 334 are neither primary
or secondary, but none of those are the original source, although many are
versions in other languages. None of the
Primary Sources are the original publication either (but if you did not know
when or where the scale was published, you might not know this), but perhaps
enough of the items reference the same Lancet paper in 1974 to make you think
that was the original. A Google search
for the scale finds the scale’s website, which references the same
article. HAPI started in 1985, so will
not index this 1974 paper.
