Hi. My name is Lei... and in the next few videos, I'm going to be showing you how to use the new OvidSP interface to do your literature searches more effectively and efficiently. OvidSP is a major platform of a lot of health sciences databases, including MEDLINE, the premiere medical literature database from the National Library of Medicine. In these videos, I'll be running example searches in MEDLINE. In this first video, I'm going to be showing you how to access OvidSP, how to select a database to search in OvidSP, and I'm also going to give you an overview of the OvidSP main search page. OvidSP can be accessed from the Medical Library homepage. I can just click on the 'Ovid' link in the 'Major Resources' list in the left column of the page. Now, there are two ways of authentication for OvidSP. First of all, like with most other library resources, I can authenticate with my computer's IP address by clicking on this 'Start Ovid' button without having to enter a password. Now, to make this work, I'll need a Yale University or Yale-New Haven Hospital IP address. If I am at an off-campus location, I can obtain such an IP by using either the Yale VPN client, or the Library's proxy server. For more information on these remote access options, you can visit the Library's off-campus access page the URL of which is showing up at the bottom of the screen. I can also authenticate by entering my Yale NetID and NetID password. If you are a first-time user, you will need to register your NetID first with Ovid before you can log in. Now, here's the difference between these two ways of authentication. When I log in with my NetID and NetID password, I'll be logging in to what's called the "Personal Edition" of OvidSP. With the personal edition, I'll be able to use the personalized services from OvidSP such as saving my searches permanently, setting up auto alerts, and RSS feeds, et cetera. Whereas, in the IP authenticated sessions, since I don't identify myself, I cannot permanently save a search or use any other personalized services, such as auto alerts and RSS feeds. The other thing I want to say, is that you do not need to have a Yale or Yale-New Haven Hospital IP to use the personal edition. But, I would try to be on the Yale or Yale-New Haven Hospital IP anyway, even if I log in to my personal edition. Why? Because even though OvidSP will give me access to its databases, when I finally get to the point of retrieving full-text articles, I still need to be on a valid campus IP to get them, in most cases. So my recommendation is — use both "Personal Edition" and a valid Yale IP address. That way you not only can personalize the OvidSP services, but also you will have fewer problems accessing the full-text of articles later on. I'm just going to log in to my personal edition... After I authenticate, the first screen I see is a list of databases. These are all the databases the library currently subscribes to on the OvidSP platform. They all share the similar OvidSP search interface. In this tutorial, I'm going to be using MEDLINE as my example to show you how to do searches in OvidSP. But keep in mind, that there are other databases available from the OvidSP platform. If you do not know what the database covers, you can click on these little blue information icons to get more information on them. For example, this will bring up a guide for global health... And this will bring up a guide for PsychINFO, the primary psychiatry literature index. You can also divide up these resources, and keep your frequently used resources in a group. So I can click on the "New Group" link... Give it a name... And, optionally, give it a description... And then I can select the resources I want to keep in my new group. Click "Save Group"... And here's my new group. One thing OvidSP can do, is what's called a multi-file search, which means you can select multiple databases from this list and search them at the same time. We're not going to cover that in this essential training series, but keep in mind, that it is possible. You can just check these boxes to select the databases you want to search, and click the "Select Resource(s)" button. Otherwise, if you only want to search one database, like what I'm going to do in this tutorial, you can just click on the title of that database. Now, I'm just going to search MEDLINE, but you may notice that there are multiple MEDLINE databases in this list. So let me talk a little bit more about that. The first one, MEDLINE 1996 to present, is a subset of the MEDLINE database — covering only articles that have been published since 1996. You may want to use this database if you're sure that the topic you are researching can only have literature published since 1996. Or, if you are only interested in the new developments of your topic since 1996. Otherwise, we recommend that you choose the bigger MEDLINE database, 1950 to present so that you can have a thorough result list about your topic. The MEDLINE "In-Process and Other Non-Indexed Citations" is the National Library of Medicine's in-process database which provides basic information and abstracts of an article before its reference is added to MEDLINE. The citations in the OLDMEDLINE database were originally printed in hardcopy indexes. The OLDMEDLINE database has an overlap with the MEDLINE database because some of the OLDMEDLINE references, which meet the data standards of MEDLINE, have been loaded to MEDLINE. But remember, not all references in the OLDMEDLINE are in MEDLINE. So, if you're specifically interested in this time period, OLDMEDLINE would be a good choice. In this tutorial, I'm just going to click on the second one, 1950 to present. So this is the main search page for MEDLINE on OvidSP. This is the page where I can start my searches, and I'll probably want to return to this page frequently for a lot of the very commonly used functions. If I am not on this page, let's say I'm on this "Saved Searches" page, I can always come back to the main search page by clicking on this "Search" tab or, the main search page link, wherever it is available. By the way, we recommend that you use the links in the OvidSP interface to navigate around, and not use the back and forward buttons of your browsers, because that sometimes creates problems. In the upper right corner, I can see some help links. I can use this "Help From A Human" link to send a question to a medical librarian. This "Help" link will take me to a comprehensive document about OvidSP so if you have a question about your search, or the OvidSP interface, you can either send us a question, or you can use the online help linked from here. There is, of course, also the "Logoff" link. Once I'm done with my search, I can click here to log out of my session. My session can also be timed out beyond the idle time limit which currently is one hour and fifteen minutes of inactivity. Down here is the search history table. Every single search I run in my session will be recorded here. I can do various things to them... I can, of course, refer back, or re-run a search... Or, more importantly, I can combine individual searches using the boolean operators "AND", or "OR". I can save my search history so that I can come back to it later. I can also save it as an e-mail alert, or as an RSS feed, to keep up with any future records that match my search criteria. We will talk more about these very useful functions later in these tutorials. The search history table is collapsible if you tight on screen real estate. It is also moveable, so I can move it down if I want my search area to show up higher. This is the search area. I can see that there are different types of searches, and, by default, I am under "Advanced Search". The current database name is displayed in the search area, under "Selected Resources". If I want to run my search in a different database, or as I mentioned before, in multiple databases, I can click on this "Ovid Resources" link, and we'll see this pop-up box of all available OvidSP databases again. This is the same as what we saw when we first logged in. I can then select a different database, or select multiple databases from here. Again, I can group them, I can check out the field guide for each of these databases by clicking on the blue information icon. I'm just going to cancel these out. So, that's what I have today. In the next few videos, I'm going to show you how to actually run an effective search using OvidSP. But before we can run an effective search, we have to know exactly what we are looking for, and how to actually prepare our research or clinical question for a search in OvidSP. And that's exactly what I'm going to show you in the next video. I'll see you next time.