About BUMC MEDLINE Plus/OVID
- What is BUMC MEDLINE Plus/OVID?
- OVID MEDLINE Help Guide
- Database Descriptions:
- BUMC MEDLINE Plus/OVID Tutorial
- System Features
- Eligibility for Login Names & Passwords
- Alumni Eligibility for Login Names & Passwords
- Full Text Journals on BUMC MEDLINE Plus/OVID
- Connecting to BUMC MEDLINE Plus/OVID from Home or Office Computers
- MEDLINE Tutorials
- Research Assistance
- BUMC MEDLINE Plus/OVID Search Tips
- Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) fact sheet from the National Library of Medicine
- Boolean Logic [i.e., AND, OR]
- Bibliographic Management Software programs: Downloading and Importing Citations into Programs such as EndNote, ProCite or Reference Manager.
BUMC MEDLINE Plus/OVID is Boston University Medical Center's in-house MEDLINE literature search system. BUMC MEDLINE Plus/OVID provides access to the MEDLINE, CINAHL (nursing and allied health), and several Evidence Based Medicine databases. Each database provides full searching capabilities using the OVID, Inc. search interface.
BUMC MEDLINE Plus/OVID is available for use by faculty, staff and students of the Boston University and the Boston Medical Center.
The system can be accessed from terminals in the Alumni Medical Library without entering an individual login name or password. Eligible users may also register for individual login names and passwords that will allow remote access from home or office computers. BUMC MEDLINE Plus/OVID is on the Web at: http://med-libinfo.bu.edu/ovidweb/.
The MEDLINE database is produced by the National Library of Medicine (NLM) and covers the fields of medicine, dentistry, psychiatry, public health, pharmacy, nursing and other biomedical sciences. BUMC MEDLINE contains the full MEDLINE database with over 11 million citations to world-wide journal literature from 1966 to the present.
Also included in MEDLINE are all of the materials formerly published in the AIDSLINE, BIOETHICSLINE, and HealthSTAR databases. To aid searchers in the retrieval of these records, BUMC MEDLINE Plus/OVID provides a journal subset limit option in MEDLINE that enables users to easily limit their results to records that meet the NLM search criteria for each of these files.
CINAHL [Cumulative Index to Nursing & Allied Health Literature] dates from 1982 to the present, and contains more than 200,000 citations to 550+ English-language nursing and allied health journals. CINAHL also provides citations to new books and pamphlets in nursing and allied health fields, audiovisual materials, dissertations, selected conference proceedings, standards of professional practice and educational software. The CINAHL database corresponds to the printed Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature.
BUMC MEDLINE Plus/OVID contains Evidence Based Medicine Reviews, a collection of evidence-based healthcare resources designed for use by clinicians and researchers. Reflecting current practices in the medical field to base clinical practices on accumulated evidence from the primary medical literature, Evidence Based Medicine Reviews provides content from several premier sources. These resources can be identified via the limit to All EBM Reviews option in MEDLINE, searched independently, or searched altogether in the Evidence Based Medicine Reviews collection.
The Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews (COCH) contains reviews of current medical research. The Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews (COCH) includes the full text of the regularly updated systematic reviews of the effects of healthcare prepared by The Cochrane Collaboration. The reviews are presented in two types:
- Complete reviews - Regularly updated Cochrane Reviews, prepared and maintained by Collaborative Review Groups
- Protocols - Protocols for reviews currently being prepared (all include an expected date of completion). Protocols are the background, objectives and methods of reviews in preparation.
Each issue of COCH contains new and updated reviews and protocols. COCH is unlike other "journal" or "serial" publications in that once a review is published it will appear in every issue thereafter. Because of this, each Review or Protocol includes a section about how to cite that document if needed.
The ACP Journal Club (ACP) from the American College of Physicians consists of two journals ACP Journal Club, a publication of the American College of Physicians, and Evidence-Based Medicine, a joint publication with the British Medical Journal Group. The editors of ACP Journal Club screen the top clinical journals on a regular basis and identify studies that are both methodologically sound and clinically relevant. They write an enhanced abstract of the chosen articles and provide a commentary on the value of the article for clinical practice. Using this source, clinicians can quickly understand and apply to their practice important changes in medical knowledge, without having to read and synthesize for themselves thousands of journal articles.
The Cochrane Controlled Trials Register (CCTR) contains over 300,000 bibliographic references to controlled trials in health care. Cochrane groups and other organizations contribute their specialized registers; and these registers, together with references to clinical trials identified in MEDLINE and EMBASE, form the CCTR database. of definitive controlled trials. These controlled trials have been identified by the distinguished contributors to the Cochrane Collaboration. They and others, as part of an international effort to search the world's health care journals (and other sources of information) systematically, have combined results to create an unbiased source of data for systematic reviews.
The Database of Abstracts of Reviews of Effectiveness (DARE) is a full text database containing critical assessments of systematic reviews from a variety of medical journals. DARE is produced by the expert reviewers and information staff of the National Health Services' Centre for Reviews and Dissemination (NHS CRD) at the University of York, England, and consists of structured abstracts of systematic reviews from all over the world. DARE records cover topics such as diagnosis, prevention, rehabilitation, screening, and treatment.
BUMC MEDLINE Plus/OVID boasts a number of unique features including:
- Remote access from any location worldwide
Using their individual login names & passwords, BUMC MEDLINE Plus/OVID searchers can login to the system from any computer that has an Internet connection or a modem. BUMC MEDLINE Plus/OVID is on the Web at: http://med-libinfo.bu.edu/ovidweb/. - Catalog holdings option
Detailed library holdings are included in each citation. Instead of having to go to the online library catalog to verify whether the journal is owned by the Medical Library, this information is available as part of the citation record. - More than 1200 full text journals online
BUMC MEDLINE Plus/OVID contains over 1200 full text journals in two collections: OVID Full Text and Open Links. The library subscribes to the OVID Full Text collection, which makes available the full text of 110 biomedical journals, including all graphics, tables, figures and photographs. Within the full text display, users can print the article; view an outline of the article and move to a selected section; display complete references cited within the text of a document; and link directly to MEDLINE or other full text articles. Also available is the Open Links collection, which includes links to the full text of more than 1200 journals directly from the publishers' Web sites. - Evidence Based Medicine Reviews Database (EBMR)
The limit option can be used to restrict search results to the EBMR database, which immediately locates articles that have an associated article review or topic review from Best Evidence or the Cochrane Database of Systemic Reviews.
BUMC MEDLINE Plus/OVID Applications:
BUMC MEDLINE Plus/OVID can be accessed free-of-charge from terminals in the Alumni Medical Library and the Mugar Library. No individual login name & password are needed when searching from the MEDLINE terminals in the library.
Faculty, staff and students of the Boston University and the Boston Medical Center are eligible to register for individual login names and passwords that will allow remote access to BUMC MEDLINE Plus/OVID from home or office computers.
Remote access to BUMC MEDLINE Plus/OVID is subsidized, and is free-of-charge to eligible users. Applications for remote access are available at the library Circulation Desk. Applications take approximately 10 working days to process. (Please bring a valid BUMC or BMC identification card with you when filling-out an application.)
Alumni of the Boston University schools of Medicine, Dental Medicine, and Public Health are eligible for access to BUMC MEDLINE Plus/OVID. The cost is $200 per year for unlimited searching. Alumni wishing to use the system must have an alumni card, issued by the Alumni Office. To inquire about alumni access to BUMC MEDLINE Plus/OVID, contact a reference librarian at (617) 638-4228 or refquest@bu.edu, or contact the Library's administrative offices at (617) 638-4230.
To access BUMC MEDLINE Plus/OVID from your home or office, you will need a valid login name and password, issued by the Alumni Medical Library. BUMC MEDLINE Plus/OVID is on the Web at: http://med-libinfo.bu.edu/ovidweb/.