MeSH on Demand

Does MeSH on Demand have possibilities for identifying thesaurus terms for use in a search, as I wondered if in a previous post?

MeSH on Demand is here: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/mesh/MeSHonDemand.html.  There is information about it in this NLM Technical Bulletin article. 

As a first test, I entered this text:

The use of antibiotics to treat otitis media in children under 5. 

MeSH on Demand suggests:

Anti-Bacterial Agents
Antibiotics, Antitubercular 
Child
Dermatologic Agents
Humans
Otitis Media

There is a disclaimer that says that humans might have come up with different terms, and that MeSH on Demand might suggest terms that are not in the text, or miss ones that are.  It does not assume any prior knowledge of MeSH.

I would have come up with the first and last terms, and humans, although I think that would be included implicitly if you include an age group.  I would have chosen something more specific than Child.

If you explode the first term, Anti-Bacterial Agents, you would include Antibiotics, Antitubercular.  There is no advice that I can see from MeSH on Demand about exploding.  If you use PubMed, exploding would happen by default.  

I would not have come up (at least, until I had examined some search results) Dermatologic Agents, so that is interesting and I would explore that.

There is no guidance from MeSH on Demand about how to combine terms.   There is also nothing said about freetext terms that you might use.

As a second test, I input the abstract from an reference from PubMed, and the resulting list of suggested MeSH terms had a very small overlap with the actual terms applied to that reference.  Indexers do look at more than the abstract, so there may be ideas in the article headings, conclusions and tables and figures that are not in the abstract.   Interestingly, Philippines/ is suggested (it is mentioned in the abstract) but is not actually applied to the reference. 

And as a third test, I used a search involving a drug and a condition that I had used as an example before.  MeSH on Demand identified the disease MeSH term I had chosen, and a drug MeSH term I knew about but had rejected (as too broad), plus a MeSH Supplementary Concept (the idea of those was new to me, I have to say, and I am not yet sure how you search it in Ovid!) and a MeSH term for the part of the search I had decided to deal with by means of a publication type limit or filter.   So in this case, MeSH on Demand was useful as a source of ideas.

Medline, PubMed, or both?

A question raised in a recent teaching session with MSc students undertaking systematic reviews.  Should I search Medline and PubMed?

Actually, people don't usually ask the question, but instead tell you that they have searched both, or that someone has recommended they do so, or that they have read a review where the reviewers have searched both.

I always say I am not convinced you need to search both.  But am I right?

I know PubMed includes things that Medline does not:

1. Medline indexes some journals (like Science and Nature) selectively, and will not include non biomedical / life science articles.  PubMed, however, does include them.  

I don't think this would matter to a systematic reviewer in healthcare.  

2. Issues of a newly accepted journal that predate the date when it was accepted for indexing in Medline will be included in PubMed.  This might matter, but I have never been convinced that it matters enough to search both databases.

3.  References sent from the publisher, but not yet indexed for Medline.  This of course, might matter, but we have access to what used to be called "PreMedline", and what is now called "Medline In Process", which is these references.  So, if your search includes freetext, you ought to find it without using PubMed.

But what about the fact that PubMed and Medline have interfaces that work in different ways?   Is it possible to find material in one that you did not find in the other, just because of the way the search works?   Surely if you search PubMed using the MeSH browser, and select the same MeSH terms as you did in Medline, you would find the same material.   I have to say, that when I have been doing detailed searching for research projects (and this is not something I do a lot of, I do spend much more time teaching others to do it), I have never used PubMed, and always used Ovid Medline.

Here is a search that I did in Ovid Medline and PubMed.  The syntax is Ovid's, and I used the MeSH browser and Advanced Search in PubMed to replicate it.  The unexploded MeSH heading was not used in the results set, but I just wanted to check that PubMed had exploded the heading in set 1.

Searches run 2230 BST 18.4.15
		Ovid Medline	PubMed
1	Exp Diabetes Mellitus, Type 2/	90273	88785
2	Diabetes Mellitus, Type 2/	90098	88612
3	Type 2 diabetes.ti,ab.	72369	72674
4	Insulin glargine.ti,ab.	1221	1234
	(1 or 3) and 4	767	775
	(1 or 3)	116064	115948

 

1542 references in total.  Using RefWorks to remove close duplicates leaves 795. Because author names are not formatted the same, and journal titles in one database are abbreviated and in the other not, finding exact duplicates did not identify many.  However, the first pair of references (that is, a pair that RefWorks thought were duplicates) were not, which makes me wonder if I deleted items that were not duplicates.  

So, there are a few references in PubMed that are not in Ovid Medline, and vice versa.  I need to look in more detail at this to see why.

Removing large numbers of duplicates in RefWorks (I tell my students they can use RefWorks to manage duplicates when working on a systematic review) was interesting!  I changed the default number of references per page to 500, or I would have had 50+ pages to deduplicate.  I also looked at using EndNote Online to do this but it only seems to remove duplicates across the whole library, not a single folder, and as I had been using it for a real project, I decided not to do that.

 

More about changes to Ovid

I have since found a posting on Laikas MedLibLog about this, and Laika has obviously looked at this properly! So, I can now report that you can move the search history box so it is under the search box - drag it using the grey rectangle in the top right hand corner of the search history. You can also close either or both results managers - although they will both be open in any new Ovid session.

Laikas posting is here (in English and ook in Nederlands) and is gratefully acknowledged. She talks about other things besides, so please read her posting for more!

I also discover that you can customise the limit tick boxes that appear on the main search screen. But those choices seem to disappear in any new session. I have not investigated whether it remembers the choices if you are logged into your personal account.

Changes to Ovid

Back after paternity leave. Ovid has made some minor changes to its interface. At a quick look these seem to be:

The results manager is now above and below the search history and search box - overkill, perhaps? I have to say I quite liked it where it was, at the side, but I am sure I will get used to this new position.

There is a multifield search - allowing you to combine author and title, or journal and date, for example. I can't remember if the "search fields" option was there before. Our Ovid still defaults (at our request) to Advanced Ovid Search

The search box has moved so it is under the search history.

Currently there seem to be problems with logging into personal accounts. My existing password was declared invalid when I tried to use it. On advice of colleagues, who have been through all this already, I requested a new password. I logged in with it, and tried to change it. There are no rules given, but when I tried to change it back to the old password I discovered that a password needs to be between 6 and 8 characters. (My old one was 10). I chose a new one, and that was declared invalid, as was the next one. Again, on advice of colleagues, I tried logging in with the first of those new ones, and it worked. We are following this up with Ovid, but meanwhile, the advice needs to be: request a new password, login with it, change it to another one but ignore the warning that the new one is invalid. Try it out before deciding it is.

(Note: you only need a personal account to save searches or search alerts, not to use Ovid).

Ovid Medline and EndNote

Problem solved! I posted to Thomson's email discussion list, and John East of the University of Queensland Library replied with a solution. There are tags within the filter that EndNote uses to decide which filter to choose to import the references. There was another filter with the same settings for those tags, and EndNote was using that filter instead. That filter (the one for Ovid AutoAlerts) was set to import AU and FA both into the Author field.

I would never have thought of this in a long time! Most grateful to John for his help.