Demos and Training Tutorials
Some new tutorials are posted on the Ovid Resource Center site. We'll post updated tutorials from other sites as they become available.

OvidSP Tutorials from Lei Wang of the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library, Yale University of Medicine. Some content is specific to Yale users. Lei provides excellent overviews of the OvidSP search interface.

• New Features of OvidSP - August 2010 release -- HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
   
• Getting Started with OvidSP (9 minutes)
• Formulating Your Question (5 minutes)
  Lei Wang discusses how to construct a good literature search using OvidSP.
• Medical Subject Headings (11 minutes)
  Lei Wang discusses searching Medline in OvidSP using Medical Subject headings (MeSH).
• Combining and Limiting Searches (7 minutes)
  Lei Wang provides more tips on using the OvidSP search interface.
• Search Result Display (7 minutes)
  Lei Wang provides more tips on using the OvidSP search interface. This tutorial lasts just under 7 minutes.
• Creating AutoAlerts and RSS Feeds in Ovid SP
  Lei Wang demonstrates how to save searches as "AutoAlerts" or RSS feeds so you can be automatically notified of any new articles that match your search criteria. This tutorial last 4 minutes.
  If you find that your St. John's Ovid access does not allow you to use these features please contact a Medical Librarian. St. John's Medical Librarians can also provide assistance in creating AutoAlerts and/or create AutoAlerts for you upon request.
• Saving Search History (4 minutes)
  Lei Wang demonstrates how to save an Ovid search strategy / search history. This allows you to automatically re-run a search in the future, or complete a search in more than one session. Please note that saving a search history is different from saving search results.

How does Basic Search work?
Basic Search employs Natural Language Processing to make it easy for all types of users—not just beginners—to get quick yet comprehensive and accurate answers to complex questions across all content. Basic search is intended to find best results, not all results. The results of a basic search will be limited to 500 citations.

With Basic Search, simply enter a search term or ask a question in ordinary, everyday English terms and click Search. There’s no need to use special syntax rules, search conventions, or complicated search strategies.

Best Practices in Basic Search (print ready PDF handout)
The tips below are a good guide to helping you and your users get the search results you’re looking for quickly and easily.

• State your query as concisely as possible. Every term entered is weighted in the search algorithm. Try not to use unnecessary modifiers such as “really big ekg changes in advanced hypokalemia.” Just enter, "ekg changes in hypokalemia".
• Use nouns more than verbs.
• Avoid using Boolean Operators like AND, OR, NOT
• Do not "force phrasing" by imposing quotation marks, parenthesis, or hyphens within your query. For example, if you enter weather-related you lose all expansions on the word weather because Ovid perceives the hyphenated phrase as a single term that has no possible expansions.
• Avoid spelling errors by keeping the Check Spelling box pre-selected.
• Use only free text or ordinary, everyday English terms; Ovid syntax is not fully supported in Basic Search.
• Expect approximately 500 relevancy-ranked results; however, occasionally you will see more when articles have the same rank. 

1. OvidSP filters the terms of your query, eliminating irrelevant noise words and tightening word choices into validated search terms and phrases. Here is an example.

2. OvidSP utilizes a proprietary medical lexicon (drawn from the Unified Medical Language System [UMLS] Meta-thesaurus, medical dictionaries and thesauri, medical acronyms, drug and disease names, and standard American and British English dictionaries) to expand validated terms to include:

• Word variations
• Synonyms (such as alternate names of drugs or diseases)
• Acronyms
• Alternative spellings (such as those that occur between British English and American English)

3. OvidSP then analyzes your original query to identify the nouns, noun phrases, and adjectives that shape the topics of your query, and incorporate them into an overall, expanded search strategy. For example, a Natural Language search for weather related migraines would expand to include the following terms from the lexicon:

4. OvidSP then executes searches using these expansions and compiles all findings into a single results set on the Main Search Page.
 

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Ovid Advanced Search (previously titled the Ovid Syntax Search)

The Ovid Advanced Search tab is very equivalent to the Ovid Gateway searching most St. John's users are familiar with. The search terms that are entered are mapped to subject headings.

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