Searching a biomedical database from Bulgaria : the ABS database

The University of Sofia, Bulgaria, disseminates local biomedical literature (1994 to present) through a free online database, ABS. We systematically searched ABS to identify citations to controlled trials and find what proportion of these studies are to be found on MEDLINE. We searched using Bulgarian and English phrases; manually selected citations of controlled trials and sought these citations on MEDLINE. Using the two languages we found a total of 628 unique citations, of which 47 of which seem to be relevant controlled trials (precision 7.48%, 13% of ABS citations were found on MEDLINE). The trials in ABS commonly focused on evaluation of care for people with cardiovascular or urological problems

Searching a biomedical database from Bulgaria : the ABS database

The University of Sofia, Bulgaria, disseminates local biomedical literature (1994 to present) through a free online database, ABS. We systematically searched ABS to identify citations to controlled trials and find what proportion of these studies are to be found on MEDLINE. We searched using Bulgarian and English phrases; manually selected citations of controlled trials and sought these citations on MEDLINE. Using the two languages we found a total of 628 unique citations, of which 47 of which seem to be relevant controlled trials (precision 7.48%, 13% of ABS citations were found on MEDLINE). The trials in ABS commonly focused on evaluation of care for people with cardiovascular or urological problems

Searching a biomedical bibliographic database from the Ukraine: the Panteleimon database

The Panteleimon database is available via the Internet and is a public access, database, capable of being searched in English, Russian and Ukrainian, covering medical, pharmaceutical, and chemical publications, published in he Ukraine and Russia from 1998. Describes the formulation of a search strategy for the Panteleimon database, for the identification of citations to randomized controlled trials (RCTs), and the comparison of the search results with records included in the Cochrane Library's Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials (CENTRAL) database, to evaluate how comprehensive the coverage of the CENTRAL database is for the literature of the Ukraine. The results indicated that Panteleimon is an easily accessible bibliographic database offering easy access to the Ukrainian biomedical literature. The English language retrieval functions picked up most of the reports of RCTs/CCTs (91 per cent precision but the lower recall of 55 per cent indicates the need to search using Russian and Ukrainian terms for completeness. The overall precision of 26 per cent compares favourably with a search for RCTs in EMBASE, carried out by the UK Cochrane Centre, where 70,000 reports of RCTs were identified from 300,000 records down-loaded (precision 23 per cent). (Quotes from original text

Basic Database Searching for Health and Social Work

Library guide to searching healthcare databases; choosing keywords, using Boolean, entering search terms into a database

Database Searching on INSPIRE

Have you ever searched a database, received a set of answers that were OK but felt that more information was available if only you had the key? Many times a word or a phrase will produce interesting information but not exactly the information that is needed. Efficiently searching databases requires the separation of the search language and the database content. The purpose of this article is to discuss some searching skills to help separate the two and increase your precision. This paper will review basic searching, advanced searching, and some special features

Accessibility of Vendor-Created Video Tutorials for People with Disabilities

Many video, screencast, webinar, or interactive tutorials are created and provided by vendors for use by libraries to instruct users in database searching. This study investigates whether these vendor-created database tutorials are accessible for people with disabilities to see whether librarians can use these tutorials instead of creating them in-house. Findings on accessibility were mixed. Positive accessibility features and common accessibility problems are described, with recommendations on how to maximize accessibility