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Home > St John's Libraries 

St. John's Medical Library             Van K. Smith Community Health Library

Important Announcement

New Ovid Search Interface
Search NEW OvidSP Interface

OvidSP is a new search interface for the Ovid databases. This search interface became available to users on February 3, 2008. Your current Ovid login and password are activated for this new interface. Alerts, jumpstarts, and saved searches will all be available in OvidSP. Any new ones you create in OvidSP won't be available via the Ovid Gateway.

Interested in attending a training class?
Contact a librarian for information about OvidSP training sessions,
417-820-2795 or email libstaff@mercy.net

Ovid SP Tips From Your Medical Librarian

Ovid SP Quick Reference Card
Print copies also available from the Medical Library

OvidSP User Guide

Demos and Training Tutorials

OvidSP Basic Search

Ovid Advanced Search

Annotate your Search Results

OvidSP RSS Feeds

Demos and Training Tutorials

View Interactive Demonstration from Ovid

New Features of OvidSP, tutorial from Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library, Yale University of Medicine
Highly Recommended - some content is specific to Yale users, but overall it is a very useful tutorial to view. The tutorial lasts just over 9 minutes.

OvidSP Tutorial from the Medical College of Wisconsin Library. The tutorial lasts just over 4:30 minutes

OvidSP Tutorial Series from Lei Wang of the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library, Yale University of Medicine. Some content is specific to Yale users.

  • Formulating Your Questions using PICO
    Lei Wang discusses how to construct a good literature search using OvidSP. This tutorial lasts just under 5 minutes.
  • Medical Subject Headings
    Lei Wang discusses searching Medline in OvidSP using Medical Subject headings (MeSH). This tutorial lasts just over 11 minutes.
  • Combining and Limiting Searches in OvidSP
    Lei Wang provides more tips on using the OvidSP search interface. This tutorial lasts just over 6 minutes.
  • OvidSP Search Result Display
    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 Searches in OvidSP
    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. This tutorial lasts 3 minutes.

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.

YOUR SEARCH QUERY OVIDSP VALIDATED TERMS/PHRASES
weather related migraine weather
migraine

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
  • Strong 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:

OVID-VALIDATED TERMS TERMS EXPANDED FROM LEXICON
weather weathers
migraine migraine, hemicrania, migraines, anencephalies partial, anencephaly hemicranial, anencephaly incomplete, anencephaly partial, headache migraine, headaches migraine, hemicranial anencephaly, incomplete anencephaly, incomplete anencephaly hemicrania, migraine headache, migraine headaches, migraine unspecified, partial anencephalies, partial anencephaly

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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Annotate your search results with "yellow sticky notes"

An electronic "yellow sticky note" appears next to each citation. Click on it and you can create, view, and edit notes on a specific citation that appears in your search results. The really neat thing is that these permanently stay with the article after logging out. You can enter a note on one day about an article and then find the same article again a week later and still see your note. These notes also print out with your citations and abstracts.

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RSS Feeds

OvidSP was designed to bring you instant, convenient access to high-quality information. That means new tools and functionality to help you save time getting the research you need. One of the platform’s most popular new features is the capability to set up RSS feeds for automatic, regular delivery of important content:

  • Journal eTOCs – Get the table of contents for a new journal issue as soon as the issue is available in Journals@Ovid (also available via email AutoAlert).
  • Saved Searches – Currently, you can save a specific search for a journal or database; and when that database or journal is updated with new content, Gateway performs your saved search on the new content and sends you the information via an email AutoAlert. Now you can receive these saved searches via RSS!
  • Publish-Ahead-of-Print Journal eTOCs – Journals@Ovid also offers some Lippincott Williams & Wilkins journal content electronically before it appears in print (also available via email AutoAlert).

So What are RSS Feeds?
RSS (Really Simple Syndication) technology enables automatic, regular delivery of content to your computer so you don’t have to navigate to another website for that content. Anyone who subscribes to an RSS feed gets a steady stream of up-to-date information whenever that information becomes available. The latest news comes to you! Chances are many of your users already have RSS feeds enabled on their computer—for news headlines, blog postings, and more. Click here to read more about RSS.

In OvidSP, Really Simple Syndication is Really Simple.
OvidSP displays RSS feeds just like other systems do: as an icon in a web browser such as Internet Explorer or Firefox; in a feed reader, software installed on your PC; in web pages; or in online applications such as Google Reader that allow you to aggregate feeds from multiple sources.

Click one or more links below for screenshots that illustrate how to set up RSS feeds in OvidSP:

Note that all OvidSP RSS feeds comply with RSS 2.0 specification standards (http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/rss/rss.html ).

RSS Feeds on OvidSP, a handout from the Himmelfarb Library

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