Dear Ovid Customer:

A new year may have just begun, but it’s hard to believe that February 4th – when Ovid Gateway is scheduled to retire— is less than a month away! Much of the buzz around our new platform continues to be about the new Basic Search mode. To further help you prepare for transitioning to the new platform, below are some handy best practices on using Basic Search:

• Be mindful of search query types – There are three types of searches that work best:
  1. Group of terms: a concise expression of a concept
  2. Full query: a question or phrase stated in plain, everyday English (free text)
  3. Copy and paste a title: a variation of one or both of the above query types
• Using Include Related Terms – When you select “Include Related Terms”, OvidSP will expand upon the entered search criteria by including synonyms, acronyms, and variants of the original term(s).

• State queries concisely - For example, noise words in the following detract from the concept: really big ekg changes in highly advanced hypokalemia. Instead, keep it simple: ekg changes in hypokalemia.

• Use nouns more than verbs - Nouns are the natural home for concepts. They are easy to identify and have less ambiguity. There is research supporting the idea that search quality is high when the strategy extracts noun phrases from queries and we’ve adopted that approach.

• Do not force phrasing - Imposing quotation marks, parenthesis, or hyphens within a query causes OvidSP to not consider possible expansions. For example in the search weather related migraine, if you force a hyphen in the phrase weather-related, you lose all expansions on the word weather because OvidSP perceives the hyphenated phrase as a single term that has no possible expansions.

• Select the spell check option - Use the Basic Search spell checker to avoid common spelling errors. In addition, the Basic Search tab provides a spell checking option that checks your spelling against all terms in the lexicon and the database.

The tips above have been collected in a Best Practices in OvidSP’s Basic Search document, now available on the OvidSP Resource Center, which offers additional information on using Basic Search, including Frequently Asked Questions and the OvidSP User Guide. Check out our new training schedule, which now includes a new Basic Search in Detail course (Click here to sign up). Plus, launch kit request forms, screenshots, and more. If you have questions or feedback on the new platform, please contact your Ovid Account Representative or support@ovid.com.

Regards,

Wolters Kluwer Health - Ovid