New Ovid Features

I hope you've noticed that Ovid has spruced up its interface - it happened the second week of July!

The main menu screen has a clean updated look and some of the menu choices have been placed in different locations on the screen.

This is always hard for anyone who was so used to the old interface that you barely had to look at the screen and still could click on the correct button.

Several new features have been added to this newly spruced up interface:

Find A Citation
Find Similar
Find Citing Articles

Find a Citation is a great addition to the Ovid interface and works much the same as PubMed's Citation Matcher. It allows you to plug known information about an article into a form - and you can plug as few as one or two items. The system will return every article in the database that matches that data -- a great way to attempt the location of an article based on what little you might remember about that article. It is also useful when trying to pull up a citation quickly.

Now, this is my opinion and it's really for those folks at Yale who are using this interface to search MEDLINE and other databases, but I think that the other two features should be used with caution.

Find Citing Articles looks for citing articles in Journals@Ovid only. And while there are many journals in Journals@Ovid, it is not an accurate picture of who is really citing the article. There are other resources (Web of Science, Scopus) available that will simply do a better job for you.

Finding Similar is using an alogorithm based on words in the title to find similar articles. Every time that I've tried this, it's been disappointing. I usually get one or two 'similar' articles but I know there's more.

So, enjoy the new look and Find a Citation but be cautious with Find Citing Articles and Find Similar.