Wolters Kluwer Health - OvidSP

A healthcare search site that does exactly what it says on the tin

Wolters Kluwer Health is a big player in delivering custom electronic research data for the academic, healthcare and medical sectors. So when the company updated its recently launched OvidSP precision search and discovery platform, promising new features and all-important functionality, it was clearly worthwhile taking a look.

The upgraded site supports the downloading of MARC records for all the books and journals subscribed to within your particular package, and the addition of an annotation exports feature allows these to be exported to a bibliographic citation manager.

For non-English language speakers, the update sees the start of the process of introducing interface support in local languages, including French, German and Spanish.

Finally, there are numerous little tweaks designed to improve the interface generally, all of which have been based on the workflow of end-users. Although this might not sound like much, when you put it all together and experience it within the context of using OvidSP, it really does make a huge difference.

Under the microscope
I went hands-on with OvidSP, accessing three databases during the review period: books, LWW Journals and Medline.

The login page presented the four language options, each just a mouse click away and working as promised. The interface is supremely intuitive to use, helped along by a handy hints box.

Ticking a checkbox beside one or all of the databases and hitting the open selected resources button gets you started. This ease of use continued throughout the entire review process; never once did I feel that anything would be beyond my reach.

Beginners can stick with the default Basic search, which anyone who has ever Googled will be at home with. Clicking on the Limits option takes searching beyond Google with a handy set of delimiters such as publication year, abstracts, full text, PsycArticles and more.

Perform a search and the almost instantaneous results are sorted by relevancy and displayed in brief, with full abstracts, references, table of contents and full text (where available) only a link click away.

Narrowing or broadening a search is equally simple, courtesy of the tools that appear to the left of the results.
But scroll down on the left and you discover the real joy of the OvidSP Results Manager, which lets you change to a full display, get a print preview, email your results or save to a file with equal ease.

You can change the desired fields with a single click, alternate between formats including BRS/tagged, reprint/medlars and even XML, as well as change the primary and secondary sort keys.

If you want more, you can opt for the Advanced Search interface with a click of the mouse and get full Boolean support along with command-line editing.

Or how about a quick method of finding a citation if you know at least part of a bibliographic citation? That’s accomplished through a digital object identifier or other unique identifier. What’s more, a search tools tag opens up more researcher manna with tools such as Trees, Permuted Index, Scope Notes and Explode available to dig out further information.

The fact that you can use all or any of these tools to search simultaneously across all subscribed to content types just adds to the pleasure, and using OvidSP truly is a pleasure.

This is helped along by the fact that OvidSP recognises that what is important here is working the way that you work, rather than the way the website thinks you should work. So you can organise and analyse your search results using time-saving tools to refine the process how you want.

Inline abstracts
If you want inline abstracts, you’ll find them on the same page as your result, just waiting to be expanded if desired. If you need annotations, you can create, view and edit them as you go and they will always stay with those results. If you want your content updates delivered via RSS or email, that’s no problem either, with customised alerting mechanisms available to keep you on top of current research.

AutoAlerts will even deliver your saved searches automatically whenever new articles that match your search criteria are available.

There is even a Publish Ahead of Print option, which will provide online access to full-text critical content as soon as the material is ready for release, but before it appears in the printed journal issue.

I honestly could not find anything to criticise with OvidSP. Even the relevancy rating worked well using natural language processing and ranking basic search results records by relevancy to the query that produced them.

My only hesitation is that I could not find out just how much OvidSP costs, although with so many subscription options and variables there are times when “will vary depending upon requirements” really does ring true, and this is one of them.

You get what you pay for and in the case of OvidSP that is a hugely intuitive and deceptively simple search interface that manages to pack a magnificently feature-rich punch behind the scenes.

It does exactly what it promises, and as long as there is a demand for highly focused and efficient searching I suspect that OvidSP will continue to do its job better than Google can.