Biological Abstracts, FSTA, Medline - New Features for OVID Databases

OVID have launched a new-look interface for their popular suite of databases which includes Biological Abstracts, Food Science & Technology Abstracts, Medline, Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews and others. As well as including a so-called "Simple Search" option (which looks very much like the Advanced Search with the addition of a box for author name) they have introduced a number of new features -

• Find Similar
• Find Citing Articles
• Find Citation

The Find Similar feature is superficially similar to the Related Records search in Web of Science (WoS). You find a record of high relevance and use it to link to other relevant titles that may not have been turned up by your keyword search, but where WoS uses shared cited references to establish relevance OVID takes subject relevant terms from the title of the originating article and finds other records that contain them. As with WoS the results of Find Similar in OVID can be somewhat random at times, but it certainly worth trying when your initial search has not produced many hits.

The Find Citing Articles feature allows you to locate articles that have cited one of those returned from your keyword search. You need to be aware, however, that the OVID databases do not contain cited reference information. Instead Find Citing Articles uses information from the Journals@OVID database which contains full-text information on some 2,200 journals largely from the medical and life sciences (Massey subscribes to only a few of these through the OVID platform). This means that the Find Citing Articles link will find other articles from these 2,200 journals only.

The Find Citation feature is not the same as Cited Reference searching in Web of Science. Instead it is a way of narrowing your search to locate a specific article by entering details of the journal name, the author and title, the date of the article and the volume number. It is usually easy enough to narrow your search to a specific article by searching for a distinctive phrase from the title but this feature could be useful for finding articles from very truncated references.

There are a number of unique OVID features that have not changed. The $ symbol is still used as the truncation symbol. The Map Term to Subject Heading is still switched on by default in Advanced Search and often produces unimpressive results - you might want to "untick" it or use the Simple Search instead. OVID persist with describing the EndNote/ProCite download format as Reprint/Medlars to the confusion of yet another generation of students. And the link to full-text articles through the Library catalogue is still messy. That said OVID is still a very good platform and the ease with which sets can be created and combined - in both Simple and Advanced Search - is as good as any similar product.