OVID & PubMed – What are the major changes? Read here.
Summary:
Clearly, OVID & PubMed are keeping an eye on the competition. (ie. Google)
OVID technologies released its new interface in early July 2005. Some
changes are welcome, particularly FIND SIMILAR and FIND CITATION.
I’m not sure I like FIND CITING ARTICLES completely, though full-text
linking options within OVID are welcome as long as users don’t mistake
this for the Web of Science.
PubMed has also made a number of structural and functional improvements to
its interface in the last few months. It’s keeping health librarians very
busy as we gear up in the hospitals for hundreds of new medical residents,
and students in July & August.
Dean Giustini
UBC Scholar Blogger
One reply on “OVID & PubMed – What are the major changes?”
This morning, for an hour, I connected to an OVID training session (see below) via a very useful 1-800 teleconference technology called webex.
I connected online, then called the 1-800 number to hear the senior trainer, Anne Gervais, present OVID’s new features. There was even time
for questions, and I asked several:
1. Find similar – Is this similar to PubMed’s “related articles”? No, this is OVID’s new proprietary algorithm (but her description of it made it sound similar as it searches for similar articles based on keyword/MeSH
2. Find Citing articles – How many journals are searched? The answer is all 1500 journals in journals@OVID, and OVID plans to expand this feature to bring it inline with other tools. Anne admitted that it is a supplement
not a replacement for WoS.
3. Brief citation results display
There were a number of other “jumpstarts” displayed here to local holdings, document delivery and even a new link to “Internet searches” (which can be customized to take you to your favorite sites or search tools on the Web – a great discovery because it means you don’t need a linkresolver like SFX to
search Scirus or Google Scholar). Your OVID admin person can enable this.
I recommend this type of learning. A few of the other librarians made comments and suggestions for improvement of the OVID interface, and Anne
said that she would take the ideas back to OVID.