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| From time to time RLML users want to know why the Medical Library subscribes to the Ovid system for accessing MEDLINE and other databases when there are more user-friendly interfaces available, particularly on the Internet. Clearly, it would be foolish for the library to spend $60,000+ dollars yearly to maintain Ovid if user-friendliness were the only important criteria. The problem is that a medical research library like ours must also have a system that provides for maximum search flexibility (i.e., maximum control over the search process) so that a comprehensive retrieval on any given subject is possible. When faculty and students are looking for only a few good articles for paper-writing or patient care, then any system will work. However, when faculty and others are writing book chapters, case reports, meta-analyses, reviews, etc., it is important that they be able to perform a search (or ask us to perform one) that doesn't miss any relevant articles. Ovid provides this capability, whereas Medscape, Knowledge Finder, and other more user-friendly systems do not. There are very sound theoretical reasons why this is true, having primarily to do with the inability of user-friendly systems to accurately dissect a search question into its component parts and take full advantage of the standardized medical vocabulary (MeSH) used to index MEDLINE records. |
| This can be easily seen in a system like Medscape by searching for articles dealing with the "cutaneous manifestations of rheumatoid arthritis". If you substitute in turn the words "dermatologic" and "skin" for "cutaneous", you will retrieve different sets of articles, a few of which in each set will be relevant but most of which will not be. If you are looking only for a couple of good articles, then you will find them no matter how you phrase the question. However, you will miss relevant articles from each set if you don't include all of the synonyms for "cutaneous" in your search. This principle holds true regardless of the search question. Because of the nature of language and the many different ways to say the same thing, there will probably always be an inverse relationship between user-friendliness and comprehensiveness of retrieval. |
| So the important question to ask before using Ovid or a more user-friendly system is whether you are looking for only a few good articles on a subject or whether you want to try to retrieve ALL articles on a subject. If the former, use the system that works best for you, including those freely available on the Internet. If the latter, then you will have much better success using Ovid. In the medical library world Ovid is considered the gold standard by which other search engines are measured and is the system used by the majority of medical school libraries in this country. Even though it is not the most intuitive when first used, it is the best compromise between a user-friendly system and one that provides maximum flexibility for a comprehensive retrieval. In addition, Ovid allows RLML to note on each journal article record whether the library carries that particular journal title, allows linking to the full-text of over 80 medical and nursing journals, and allows the mounting of databases other than MEDLINE that are more heavily used by nursing, allied health, and hospital administration personnel. |
| If you have any questions about searching Ovid, please do not hesitate
to ask a reference librarian.
twe 12/30/97 |
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Original: January, 1998
URL: http://www.medlib.iupui.edu/ref/whyovid.html |
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2002-2006, Indiana University Board of Trustees.
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