Physical Therapy Workshop. August 10, 2001, 10:00 a.m. 12:30 p.m. Guide No. 1. Search terms: Diabetes Mellitus and Skin. Ovid Technologies, Inc. Databases ACCESS TO THE OVID DATABASES You must first go to the Health Professions Division Library homepage. The URL or electronic address for the HPD Library homepage is www.nova.edu/cwis/hpdlibrary. Here below, you can see what it looks like. Click on the text NSU Electronic Databases. See the arrow above. You will be taken to the page that you see below. Click on All Databases. The other choice, Medical & Health, generates a list of databases each with a paragraph describing its contents and use. You might need to look at this page at first, when you are just beginning to acquaint yourself with the NSU system and the various databases, but soon you will find All Databases to be much more convenient. The choice All Databases creates a grid on which you will see the names of the Providers/Vendors of the databases to which Nova Southeastern University subscribes. 1
Medline, CINAHL, HealthSTAR, and many other very useful databases, are provided to the school by the company known as Ovid Technologies, Inc. Because of the firm s engineers, who have created a wonderfully designed interface and powerful limiting functions, Ovid s products are in most cases far better than those offered by any other database vendor or provider. In consequence, you will no doubt find it expedient to begin your searching in these databases. If you cannot find enough material, which is indeed rare, go to the databases of other vendors. For this demonstration, you will need only to find and click on the text Ovid on the grid. See the bottom arrow in the picture just below. You will be brought to the access point to the databases: the underlined and bolded text Ovid Web. Click on this text. Notice that the individual databases are listed alphabetically below. Unfortunately, it is not possible to enter the individual databases from this menu. You must first go to another page called the Choose a database page. 2
The next step is to select the Ovid database that you want to search. In the picture below, you can see the top of the list of Ovid databases available. The database that you might want to search first, Medline, is not shown below. It is further down on the list and you will need to scroll down to find it. Medline is so comprehensive that it is in most cases the best place to start. Medline resides at the bottom of the list. You will notice, when you find the database, that it is divided into quite a few parts. The reason for the division into segments is that Medline has so many records--in the millions actually--that it is convenient to divide it according to the publication dates of the articles. Most of the time, you will be interested only in the very latest research. Therefore, you will probably want to ignore the older materials and concentrate only on the most current. The latest research is found in the Ovid segment at the top of the list (1). It covers the current year and goes back only three years. To get into that part of Medline, you simply click on the appropriately dated underlined text. See the arrow below. Sometimes, though, you will need to do retrospective studies. In that case, you might want to see the records as far back as you can (2). The most comprehensive set of records is the one at the bottom of the list, from 1966 to the present. Premedline includes research that has not been processed completely but has been made available to those who need material as quickly as possible (3) for pressing or emergency cases. 3
(3) (1) (2) THE MAIN SEARCH PAGE After selecting the appropriate Medline set of articles, you are taken to the so-called Main Search Page of the database. Here, you see the full array of features: the Icon bar (1) is just below the name of the database. The Icon bar is itself a row of access points to the current set of records. You can search authors, titles, individual journal titles, and so on. THE SEARCH HISTORY BOX Below the Icon bar is the Search History box (2). The box allows you to keep a record of all of the searches that you have done during the current search session. THE QUERY BOX Below the Search History grid is the Query box (3) into which you type your search terms and on the bottom is a short list of limiters (4) or filters to eliminate irrelevant materials. (1) (2) (5) (3) (4) 4
In the image above, you can see the topic Diabetes Mellitus has been entered in the Query box. By clicking on the button Perform Search, (5) you can execute the command to search the database for records on the subject of Diabetes Mellitus. SELECTING APPROPRIATE SEARCH TERMS: THE MAPPING DISPLAY There are so many possible meanings for the search term Diabetes Mellitus, that it will be necessary for you to select the specific one that you have in mind. In the case of this search, there are several that you may want to be included. Because you might want to know the influence of any form of diabetes on the skin, you should perhaps select three of the options offered on the screen below: Insulin-Dependent, Non-Insulin Dependent, and the generic term for the disease, Diabetes Mellitus. By selecting all three possibilities, you make sure not to lose any articles that might be of value to you later on, when you combine terms. This process will be explained in detail later on. THE MAPPING DISPLAY: FOCUSING AND EXPLODING ON A SEARCH In the image above, you can see two rows of boxes to the right of the listed search terms. You will notice also that the Focus boxes have been checked for the three terms that you want to include in the search. Focusing means that you want the search engine to limit the records to those in which Diabetes Mellitus, or any of its permutations, is the main topic of the article. From a hierarchy of related medical terms, which the search engine consults, you will need to exclude articles that have other topics beside Diabetes Mellitus. The search engine will eliminate extraneous material, when you click in the Focus box. The final step to take is to click on the Continue button in the upper left of the box. This button, no matter what the text inside it says, always executes the last 5
command. Here, it continues to execute the search on Diabetes Mellitus and its different forms with no other topics to perhaps dilute the research by diverting attention away from the main focus. There is one more function on the page shown above. The circles containing the lower case letter i are called Scope notes. The definitions of the terms are provided. Consulting these notes allows you to be sure that you are choosing the appropriate search term. SUBHEADINGS After refining the search by using the proper search terms, you will often be asked to make the search even more precise. Diabetes Mellitus has many subtopics or focus points. Are you interested in the diagnosis of the disease? Or perhaps its pathology? The subtopics, or as they are called here, the subheadings, help you to avoid retrieving articles in which the author(s) deal(s) mainly with a slant on the material in which you might not be interested. In this search, you are not thinking of the psychological effects of the disease on the patient or its etiology so much as the impact of diabetes on various systems of the body. The best thing to do is to take everything offered. The arrow below is pointing to the box in which you must click to retrieve all articles no matter what the slant. After making your choice of subheadings to be included in the search or retrieving the entire set of articles on the topic, you need to click on the Continue button on the top left side of the image above. 6
CREATING SETS The image below shows the result of the search on the first topic. There are 3441 records in which the topic of the articles, the Major Subject, is Diabetes Mellitus in all of its forms, Insulin-dependent or not. You can also see that the other topic of the current search, Skin, has been typed in the query box. Click on the Perform Search button to continue the search process on the second term. You can see in the image below, that you will be asked to refine the search on the second topic. As you have done before, you must first select the appropriate term and focus on it. In this case, it is the generic term Skin, as none of the other terms seem pertinent. Then, as usual, you will need to execute the search by clicking on the Continue button. 7
As in the previous search, because you have more than one search term, and you do not want to lose any articles that may be of value to you in combining terms later on, you will want to retrieve all found articles by clicking in the Include All Subheadings box at the top of the window. Below, you can see the two groups of articles retrieved. In Boolean logic, the topic of discussion that you will need to study next, the two groups of articles are called sets. Set number one contains 3441 retrieved articles or hits, and set two has 5331 hits. In the column on the extreme left of the picture below, you can see the set numbers have been generated for you automatically. 8
BOOLEAN LOGIC AND THE BOOLEAN OPERATOR AND You are closer to your objective, finding articles on the subject of the impact of Diabetes Mellitus on Skin. Moreover, you have created sets on both topics, the preliminary steps in finding the articles pertinent to your search. Now, the problem is: which of the articles retrieved in the two sets contain both subjects? It is obviously not efficient to try to read each article s abstract to find those including Diabetes Mellitus as well as Skin. The solution to the problem is to use Boolean logic. Put simply, let the search engine, with all of its powerful searching tools, look through these articles and come up with only those that contain both topics. This process is accomplished by your using what are called Boolean Operators. There are three of these: AND, OR, NOT. THE AND OPERATOR You have already learned that the search engine automatically creates numbers for each set of articles. Now, all you need to do is to combine the two sets by placing the word, the Boolean operator, AND between the numbers of the sets. You can see the procedure in the picture at the bottom of the previous page. See the bent arrow at the bottom of the screen. In the Query box, you type 1 AND 2 and click on the Perform Search button once again to execute the command. The AND operator forces the search engine to go through all of the retrieved articles to select only those that contain both search topics, and it does this all this in a matter of moments. The results of combining the two sets are shown in the next window displayed. There are only eight articles in which the focus is both on Diabetes Mellitus as well as Skin. But eight relevant articles on the topic constitute a good start. There is much that you can do to expand the number of pertinent articles: every scholarly article must have a list of references and each reference cited must also have a list of references: from eight to eighty or more articles. Of course, authors always cite references that are older than the publication date of their articles, so that might be a problem if currency is a necessity. LIMITERS By clicking on the Display box to the right of the number 3, you can display the eight articles. However, before you do that, consider the possibility that some of the eight hits 9
may be in a language that you cannot read. You can make sure to get only those articles that are in English by using the limiter English Language. A small set of limiters can be found directly below the query box. You can see that the box for English Language has been clicked as well as that of the Publication Year. There is now only a two-year range of publication dates instead of the usual four. A much larger set of limiters can be found by clicking on the Limit icon on the icon bar seen below. You can refine your search in numerous ways, when you access the complete set of limiters. THE RESULTS PAGE Going back to the results of the AND search on Diabetes Mellitus and Skin, you can see what happened, when you chose to impose the two limiters, English Language and Publication Date. Only two articles remain. To see the articles that you have retrieved and limited, you need to click on the Display button in the Display panel on the right side of the search history box. See the arrow above. 10
The articles are presented in citation form, that is, with the minimum amount of information: author(s) name(s), title of the articles, name of the journals, volume number, issue, and pages. In the brackets, immediately to the right of the article title, you can see what type of article is involved. See the small vertical arrows below. Journal Article is the term for an article based on original research. This is in contrast to a review article that amounts to a summary of articles that have been published on the subject in a given time period, usually six months. Review articles are a good way in which to begin a search, allowing someone else to do the hard work of searching and evaluating the research done prior to your own search efforts. There are other article types such as letters to the editor, clinical trials, and so forth. You can use a limiter to confine your search to a particular article type. The second article has an abstract that you can read to discover its contents; the first can be retrieved in its entirety or in Full Text. You can determine these facts by looking at the labels at the bottom right side each citation. See the horizontal arrows. THE CITATION MANAGER To print out the two articles, you must first display the Citation Manager which resides at the bottom of each screen. Just scroll up by clicking on the down arrow to bring the Citation Manager into view. Alternatively, you can click on the text Citation Manager that you see to the right above the first citation. See the downward-pointing arrow above. Below, you can see this essential part of saving articles. 11
Click in the All in this set radio box in the Citations panel and in the Citation + Abstract + Subject Headings box in the second panel, and finally on the top rectangle in the Action panel. Ignore the third panel. See the three arrows above. To print your selections you must use the print function of your browser. The arrow below points to the appropriate icon in Netscape. Below, you can see the first article s citation and other information: Unique Identifier and PubMed Identifier. Both of the numbers given to you make searching for the article again very simple. You can use the unique identifier in the query box to immediately find the article again. To do so, however, you must use the following syntax: 21081592.ui. The PubMed identifier refers to the same procedure but in the government database entitled PubMed. 12
The second image that you see below shows the subject headings and part of the abstract. The MeSH Subject Headings are very handy indeed. Where the abstract is missing, you can still see the contents of the article by perusing the list of subject headings. These represent every medical topic contained in the article. The Mesh headings can also be used to find the official language of the indexers who process the articles, when they are first published online. Sometimes, you will not know the exact word for the various terms, and you can do a much better job of searching by knowing the official words for the terms. On other occasions, you will not even know exactly what you are looking for in your search. By finding articles on the general subject, you can find more specific terms with which to refine your search and get much more relevant results. THE OR OPERATOR In order to conclude the discussion on Boolean logic, you will now learn how to use the OR operator. Suppose you are in a situation in which two search terms are almost identical in meaning and you know that some researchers tend to use one term or the other but not both. You do not want to lose articles that might be of value to you in your own research. Obviously, therefore, you need to conduct searches on both terms. You might think that this becomes complicated because so many sets have to be combined: the first synonym with the other search term and then the second search term with the other. Fortunately, such complications are easily avoided by using the OR operator. In the following search, you need to find the Treatment of athletes with torn ACLs. You know that there are many terms that are similar to Treatment in meaning. For example, there are the terms Management or Rehabilitation. For this search, you might just 13
concentrate on the terms: Treatment and Management. Here is how to do the search easily. First, you will need to create sets on both search terms. Then, you can phrase your search statement in such a manner as to do the AND and OR searches together. Below, you can see two different search approaches. Using a methodical approach, you can first create a superset, combining the synonymous terms with the OR operator: 2 OR 3. Then, you use the AND operator to combine the results of the superset, set number 5, with the other search term, Anterior Cruciate Ligament, set number 1. Below, you will see how to do the whole operation in one step. Notice that you must place the OR sets in parentheses so that this operation takes place before the combination of set 1 and sets 2 and 3. A case of simple algebra. In handout number 2, you will explore searching in multiple databases using OVID. 14