{"id":359,"date":"2008-01-17T11:05:58","date_gmt":"2008-01-17T19:05:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/migrator.rab.olt.ubc.ca\/googlescholar\/2008\/01\/17\/irreproducibility-ovidsp-basic-search\/"},"modified":"2008-01-17T11:05:58","modified_gmt":"2008-01-17T19:05:58","slug":"irreproducibility-ovidsp-basic-search","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/googlescholar\/2008\/01\/irreproducibility-ovidsp-basic-search\/","title":{"rendered":"Irreproducibility? &#8211; OvidSP Basic search"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" alt=\"basic.JPG\" src=\"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/googlescholar\/files\/2009\/02\/basic.jpg\" width=\"387\" height=\"241\" class=\"right\" \/>In my list of the <a href=\"http:\/\/migrator.rab.olt.ubc.ca\/googlescholar\/2008\/01\/New-OVID-SP-Interface---Five-(5)-Pros-&amp;-Cons,-Part-I\/\">Five (5) Pros &amp; Cons of OvidSP<\/a>, one caught the eye of rising health librarian,<br \/>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/www.slideshare.net\/jeff_mason\/advanced-google-as-a-tool-for-promoting-evidencebased-practice\">Jeff Mason, from Saskatchewan<\/a>:<\/p>\n<p><strong>Jeff<\/strong>: <em>&#8220;I&#8217;m wondering why you think <em>basic search<\/em> results won&#8217;t be reproducible.  &#8230;if a search is completely documented (exactly what you typed in, what options you had checked off etc.) and OVID&#8217;s algorithms stay the same over time (<u>questionable<\/u>) the search could easily be reproduced.&#8221;<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>Questionable<\/em> is right, Jeff. OVID&#8217;s basic search in OvidSP is not the same as it was in the OVID Gateway. However, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.google.ca\/search?hl=en&amp;q=define%3AIrreproducibility&amp;btnG=Google+Search&amp;meta=\">irreproducibility<\/a> is not a significant problem generally, unless we are asked as health librarians to perform (and document) searches for grants, clinical trials or other types of <a href=\"http:\/\/hlwiki.slais.ubc.ca\/index.php?title=Systematic_review_searching\">systematic reviews<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>There are a number of tools that wreak havoc on reproducibility: all search engines, Google scholar, OvidSP Basic Search (and, indeed, any tool or algorithm that interprets a search based  on links or term relevance). Read the section on how OvidSP&#8217;s feature <em>How Relevancy is Calculated<\/em> works. (Librarians have disliked features like this since they were introduced for books@OVID several years ago.)<\/p>\n<p><em>To me, this feature is heuristic (and iterative) but not reproducible over time.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In my list of the Five (5) Pros &amp; Cons of OvidSP, one caught the eye of rising health librarian, Jeff Mason, from Saskatchewan: Jeff: &#8220;I&#8217;m wondering why you think basic search results won&#8217;t be reproducible. &#8230;if a search is completely documented (exactly what you typed in, what options you had checked off etc.) and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-359","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/googlescholar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/359","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/googlescholar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/googlescholar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/googlescholar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/googlescholar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=359"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/googlescholar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/359\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/googlescholar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=359"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/googlescholar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=359"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/googlescholar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=359"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}