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.

NZ Science Database

Much New Zealand scientific literature is available through the standard international databases like Web of Science, Medline and Biological Abstracts which cover not only research by New Zealanders and on New Zealand topics published in international journals but which index the major New Zealand journals as well. However not all useful research is published in journals - much of it appears in reports, theses, environmental impact statements and the like. This is often known as the "grey literature".

NZ SCIENCE (formerly also known as "SIRIS" and "STIX") is a comprehensive index of New Zealand Science, provided by The Crown Research Institutes, and The Royal Society of New Zealand. Because it is created from submissions from these institutions rather than
from indexing a set range of printed publications NZ Science has an impressively wide range of sources.

NZ Science is part of the Superindex collection and is indexed with a number of newspaper indexes.

This can be interesting but if you are searching for a term that is likely to appear frequently in the press - "kiwifruit" or "earthquake" for example - you should probably switch these sources off.

It is a good idea to extend the date range at the same time - you will notice that NZ Science contains records back to the 1840s!

Use of SciFinder Scholar Database

The American Chemical Society, suppliers of the SciFinder Scholar Database, have asked us to remind you that the terms under which we purchase it allow use for academic research only. This means that if you are working part-time for another company or research institute then you are not permitted to use SciFinder Scholar for this work as it is non-academic research.

There is no reason to believe that these terms are being breached at Massey.

IEEE Xplore upgrade

IEEE recently upgraded their Xplore database. IEEE Xplore release 2.0 has a new interface which aims to look more up-to-date and requires less clicks to access results than the previous one.

There are some significant improvements:

• You can now select several records to view or download.
• When you export records to EndNote it identifies the reference type correctly (it can tell the difference between journal articles and conference proceedings).
• PDF's are searchable
• You can view and edit your search history

However, there is one notable problem.

IEEE reverses the journal and conference titles on the Xplore database, e.g.
"Systems, Man and Cybernetics, IEEE Transactions on"
"Paper presented at the Fuzzy Systems, 2004. Proceedings. 2004 IEEE International Conference on".
This means that the records you download into EndNote or other reference software will be reversed and you will need to edit them within your EndNote records.

Updated Browser Recommendations

For best performance and to ensure accuracy, IEEE recommends you use one of the following supported platforms and browsers:

Windows - Internet Explorer 5.5 or higher; Netscape 7.x or higher; Opera 7.23; Mozilla Firefox 1.0
Mac - Internet Explorer 5.2.3 ; Netscape 7.1
Unix - Netscape 7.x or higher

In addition, cookies, JavaScript and CSS styles must be enabled within the browser.
For best dial-up performance, a 56.6 or higher modem is recommended For viewing PDF files, Adobe Acrobat Reader 5.X or higher is recommended.

IEEE's own release notes:

Search Enhancements

• IEEE Members and institutional subscribers Basic Search of all fields from the home page
• 100% full text searchable PDFs
• Search the latest content update
• View the citation or citation & abstract in search results
• Select items to print, email, or download citations
• Session history view and edit your search history

Browse Improvements

• Filter the Journal & Magazine or Conference Proceedings list by publisher
• The default view for each list has increased to 25
• Conference Proceedings are grouped to show title history
• Standards list now includes the standard number in addition to title

Abstract and AbstractPlus Enhancements

• Abstract records include: document’s citation, DOI (if available), posted online date, abstract, link to full text, and buy document option
• AbstractPlus records include: document’s citation, DOI (if available), posted online date, abstract, index terms, references (if available), citing documents (if available), and link to full text

Direct Export to EndNote from Biological Abstracts

If you find that a pesky SO - is appearing before journal titles when you export records from the Biological Abstracts database to EndNote the following "simple" operation will fix the problem:

1. Click on Edit/Import Filters
2. Click on Open Filter Manager
3. Scroll to Biological Abstracts (OVID) and double-clickto open the Filter editor
   
4. From the list on the left hand side of the screen click on the bottom option, Source Parsing
5. Click on the Use Smart Parsing option
6. Click on File/Save and close the Filter editor

Your direct export should now work probably. If it doesn't, or if you can't follow these instructions, please contact us.