{"id":30,"date":"2018-03-28T13:03:30","date_gmt":"2018-03-28T12:03:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/miscellany\/?p=30"},"modified":"2021-12-06T11:55:08","modified_gmt":"2021-12-06T11:55:08","slug":"sharing-searches-on-ovid-databases","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/miscellany\/2018\/03\/sharing-searches-on-ovid-databases\/","title":{"rendered":"Sharing searches on Ovid databases (or re-running searches from text)"},"content":{"rendered":"

(thanks to the Ovid support team for info about their search launcher tool)<\/em><\/p>\n

You’ve done a\u00a0long and complex\u00a0search on Medline (or Embase or PsycInfo or whatever) on the Ovid platform, and you’d like to show it to someone else, so they can assess the results or play around with the search?<\/p>\n

The ’email jumpstart’ function (from your saved searches)\u00a0does not permit this unless the person using the jumpstart link is logged in on the same personal account. Sometimes setting up an account for a project\u00a0may be\u00a0a useful way forwards, but often it may not be practical.<\/p>\n

Solution?\u00a0Ovid have a really handy ‘search\u00a0launcher’ tool: http:\/\/demo.ovid.com\/demo\/ovidsptools\/launcher\/launcher.html<\/a><\/p>\n

It allows you to simply paste in\u00a0the text of a search,\u00a0pick the database you want\u00a0to run it on (by choosing the appropriate code from their list) and run.<\/p>\n

To share a search, you just need to send\u00a0the\u00a0search steps to your recipient\u00a0in a format\u00a0that can easily be\u00a0pasted into the search launcher\u00a0–\u00a0this needs to be each step of the search on a new line, without set numbers or results numbers.<\/p>\n

There are a number of ways to get this from your search – if you select one or more results and choose to export or print\u00a0results, you can tick to include your search history (which you can then use), using this option, the\u00a0easiest two routes seem to be:<\/p>\n

Choose Print<\/strong>, click to view the print\u00a0preview<\/strong>, copy the search history and\u00a0paste\u00a0into Word as a table, highlight and copy the\u00a0correct column (without column heading).<\/p>\n

Or: Export<\/strong>,\u00a0choose to do so in\u00a0XML format<\/strong>, save, open with Excel<\/strong>, highlight and copy the correct column (without column heading).<\/p>\n

Send the search lines to whoever needs it, then\u00a0they can paste into the launcher and start working with it.<\/p>\n

Another interesting application of the search launcher is when you come across an existing search (in a review article appendix, for example),\u00a0this tool means you can relatively easily\u00a0re-run\u00a0that search\u00a0\u00a0without typing it in step at a time.<\/p>\n

To prepare the search to be pasted into the launcher, you might want to go through this process:<\/p>\n

Copy and paste the search into MS Word. I’m assuming each step of the search will be on a separate line, but will probably have the search step number at the start of the line (and this is what will need removing).<\/p>\n

Put a blank line at the start of the document (to ensure there’s a paragraph mark before line ‘1’ – this will be needed shortly).<\/p>\n

Press Ctrl+H<\/strong> to bring up Word’s Find and Replace <\/strong>function. Click More >>><\/strong> to see the advanced options, and tick Use wildcards<\/strong><\/p>\n

In the ‘Find’ box put:<\/p>\n

(^013)([0-9]@ )<\/strong><\/p>\n

With a space before that final bracket. This is telling Word to look for two things in sequence: a paragraph marker, then\u00a0a digit\u00a00-9 any number of times (i.e. any number)\u00a0followed by\u00a0a space.<\/p>\n

In the ‘Replace’ box put:<\/p>\n

^013<\/strong><\/p>\n

This is telling Word to replace with just a paragraph marker.<\/p>\n

Replace All<\/strong> and that should be that.<\/p>\n

If there is any other punctuation in the search, just add that into the ‘Find’ box as required; e.g. if you have dots after your step numbers, use: (^013)([0-9]@. )<\/strong><\/p>\n

You should end up with a tidied-up search\u00a0with just\u00a0each step on it’s own line – ready to be pasted into the launcher and run as a search.<\/p>\n

***UPDATE***<\/p>\n

If you have text you want to remove at the\u00a0ends<\/em> of lines, obviously you can add that in as part of the searched-for sequence.<\/p>\n

If you want to use a character that would form part of the search syntax (for example, a bracket), use a backlash in front of it, e.g. \\(<\/strong><\/p>\n

I found lots of helpful detailed info about what can be done with Word’s wildcard finding and replacing functionality here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

If you find the search text doesn’t paste correctly into the Search Launcher with line breaks, run another Find and Replace – with ‘Use wildcards’ unticked – to find ^013<\/strong> and replace with ^p\u00a0<\/strong>and this should definitely ensure regular line breaks are there to copy.<\/p>\n

Finally, the link on the Search Launcher page seems out of date so, for convenience, here’s a current link to the list of most Ovid database shortname codes<\/a>, plus it can be worth checking individual database guides (for e.g. Medline<\/a> and Embase<\/a>).<\/p>\n

If rerunning a search in order to update a search (run in the past), and you only want to get results added since a date it was previously run, the best fields to use are (generally, currently, though there are other fields worth considering): ‘ed’ (‘Entry Date’) in Medline and ‘dc’ (‘Date Created’) in Embase, both applied using this format:<\/p>\n

limit 57 to ed=20170329-20191128<\/em><\/p>\n

(Limiting results from step 57 to entry dates of 29th March 2017 to 28th November 2019. In Embase, it would just be dc instead of ed)<\/p>\n

Though note: ed generally won’t work for Medline E-pub Ahead of Print<\/em> or In-Process & Other Non-Indexed Citations<\/em> – to get new results from these sources, you may need to run the search independently on them without the ed limit.<\/p>\n\n\n

***UPDATE 12\/2021***
Ovid now has an incredibly useful function of a button that will create a link to your search that you can send to anyone, thus obviating the need to use the search launcher for this. However, the launcher still remains really handy when you have a long search in text format that you want to run.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(thanks to the Ovid support team for info about their search launcher tool) You’ve done a\u00a0long and complex\u00a0search on Medline (or Embase or PsycInfo or whatever) on the Ovid platform, and you’d like to show it to someone else, so they can assess the results or play around with the search? The ’email jumpstart’ function … Continue reading “Sharing searches on Ovid databases (or re-running searches from text)”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1915,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[14,13,9,10,15,12,11],"class_list":["post-30","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-databases-literature-searching","tag-embase","tag-medline","tag-ovid","tag-ovidsp","tag-psycinfo","tag-rerunning-searches","tag-sharing-searches"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/miscellany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/miscellany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/miscellany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/miscellany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1915"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/miscellany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/miscellany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":76,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/miscellany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30\/revisions\/76"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/miscellany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/miscellany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/miscellany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}