Center for Health Evidence: Ovid Databases

OVID Help Resources

Ovid Discovery

Ovid Discovery is an online portal (or website) that has been specially developed for medical libraries. You will also be able to search all of Huntington Health's subscriptions to databases, e-journals, e-books, and open-access scholarly e-resources from one search box.

Try a search here

How to Find a Specific Journal Article 

Basic Search Tips

• Keywords: Use a straightforward concept with more nouns than verbs.
• Free Text: Type in a question or phrase stated in plain language.
• Using Include Related Terms - When you select "Include Related Terms", Ovid will expand upon the entered search criteria by including synonyms, acronyms, and variants of the original term.
• Do not force phrasing - Quotation marks, parenthesis, or hyphens within a query causes Ovid not to consider possible expansions. 
• Use the Basic search in Medline for new, non-Index Articles: Newly published articles must be fully indexed to be searched using MeSH terms. To find recently published (non-indexed) articles in Ovid, use keywords in basic search mode. 

Advance Search Tips

• Boolean Operators: AND, OR, NOT. Used to combine terms, in order to expand or narrow your search query. 
  • AND: retrieves articles that contain ALL terms. Narrows the search. 
  • OR: retrieves articles either/any of the terms. Broadens the search. 
  • NOT: Eliminates articles that have this term. Narrows the search. 
• Truncation: This is an easy way to search for multiple versions of a word. Remove the end of the word (leaving the root part of the word) and replace the ending with an asterisk *. Broadens the search. 
  • For example, nurse, nurses, or nursing. Use the truncated word nurs* in your query. 
• MeSH (Medical Subject Headings): The controlled vocabulary created by the National Library of Medicine. MeSH terms are used for indexed articles. Search the MeSH database to find relevant terms. 

OVID Basic Search Tutorials

OVID Advanced Search Tutorials