This summer, Ovid databases adopted a new look with added features: Find Citation, Find Similar, and Find Citing Articles. Some of these features mirror previous developments in PubMed.
New Multifile Searching Look
The first thing you may notice in the new interface is that the multifile searching option is now part of the main database menu. A previous JEFFLINE Forum article describes how to search several Ovid databases at once, and offers some caveats on using this feature.
Find Citation Feature
Find Citation provides a feature like PubMed's Single Citation Matcher for all the Ovid databases. Use it to find articles when you have an incomplete or incorrect citation [e.g., “it was an article by Smith in the New England Journal…”]. Enter the information you're sure of in the form and use the auto-truncate function to find variations of journal or author names.
Find Similar Feature
Once you have some search results, use Ovid's Find Similar feature, which functions like PubMed Related Articles. Find Similar selects search 'concepts' from the article title and searches for those concepts and related synonyms in other article titles, rather than in subject headings. The most relevant citations will display first. While the feature is available in all Ovid databases, it is optimized for medical terminology.
Find Citing Articles Feature
The Find Citing Articles feature should be called “Find Citing Journals@Ovid Articles.” This feature only identifies citations that appear in any of the several hundred journals in the Journals@Ovid database. These journals only go back to 1993, and are mostly clinical journals.
The Find Citing Articles feature also ignores the cited reference searching features in CINAHL and PsycINFO, which include citations from books and book chapters, as well as journals not found in Journals@Ovid. CINAHL's citations began in 1994 and PsycINFO's go back to 1988.
Citations for scientific articles are better searched in Scopus, currently going back to the mid 1990's.
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