IS IT ME? Searching for a phrase

EndNote EndNote How To
1

Hi all

I have just installed Endnote X3 on a Mac, and am trying to search pubmed (nlm) for a phrase. If I search for “protein turnover” or "‘protein turnover’ I hit a big zero, if I search for protein turnover, I get hundreds of thousands. This works simply searching pubmed online. I must be missing a trick here somewhere, and all advice greatly appreciated.

Thanks

2

It isn’t just you – for some reason “IS” is not an option when searching PubMed with ENX3. I don’t know if it was always this way, but putting two words in a search in X3 definately triggers a “Protein” AND “turnover” search and not the desired “protein turnover” phrase search. 

Sometimes I just bite the bullet and do the search and then repeat it on showing references (in Online, not integrated, mode obviously) with the IS instead of “contains” option.

The other option is to use the much more powerful searches from within Pubmed and then to export them to Endnote (or export/import using filters). 

3

Thanks leanne,

Not what I was looking for, and a frustrating omission, imho. I think it was different in previous incarntions, but my meory is not that good anymore!

4

When EndNote connects to an online database to search for references the database runs the search, not EndNote.  Not all of the fields or options available in EndNote will be available on the online database, and as a result the options available during an online search will be different.

With PubMed you can search on a phrase, it just needs to be entered a certain way.  You will enter the phrase in one search box, but instead of spaces you would use +

Examples:

-Searching on “monkey blood” found 2062218 references

-Searching on “monkey” AND “blood” found 2062218 references

-Searching on “monkey+blood” found 72 references

1 Like
5

Thanks Peter, but I searched and searched the program help and the manual, and couldn’t find this information.  Is it documented anywhere? 

6

This was something I discovered while testing connections to PubMed.  This is something unique to PubMed and it does not apply to the other connections.  This information is not in the manual, but here are the notes I made when testing the connection to PubMed:

The first item is what I entered in the PubMed webpage’s search and the second item is what I entered in EndNote.
“john smith”                              “john+smith”
“mechanical and stem cells”    “mechanical” AND “stem+cells”
                                                 “mechanical+AND+stem+cells”
“stem and cells”                       “stem cells”
                                                 “stem” AND “cells”
‘“Zhang G”[AUTHOR]’              ? cannot reproduce, EN searches for Zhang G*
“smith, john”                             “john+smith”
“smith, ab”                                “smith+AB”(will hit on smith, a. b.)

7

Indeed, this seems to work…

search, all fields, “protein turnover” (without quotes - if you include the quotes there are zero hits, so what do the quotes mean?) = 2,950,960 hits ( a few more than I wanted!)

seach, all fields, “protein+turnover” (with quotes) = 3130 hits, the same as obtained by searching directly.

I’m surprised this hasn’t come up before. I am so used to phrase searching that I was flummmoxed when I couldn’t make it work in X3. Perhaps something added to FAQs?

Thanks for persistence