The UX Caucus Database Tips Blog

By Kate Saylor and Andy Hickner

The User Experience (UX) Caucus recently launched a new Database Tips blog. The project began in February 2021 when five members of the UX Caucus met to discuss the idea and its goals. The original focus of this work was to examine current challenges across various databases and platforms and to report out on quirks and workarounds for complex search projects. We discussed what the format might look like and eventually determined a blog might be a good format because it would be less static than, for example, a repository like the Open Science Framework. Life then got in the way, so the project was on ice for most of 2021. In late 2021, we resumed work by investigating blogging platforms. We identified Blogger as the best option because it was free and ad-free. Once we created the blog, we added blog theming, an About Us page, and information about how to subscribe.

Our process for developing content begins with crowdsourcing contributors from the UX Caucus. Non-caucus members are welcome to write for us as well. We aim to keep tip creation quick and painless. Most tips have taken fifteen minutes or less to write, publish, and tag. We often will include screenshots to illustrate. Thus far, all tips have been in writing, but we are open to video contributions as well, with a target length of two minutes or less. We aim for a weekly posting schedule. To help group related tips by database, platform, topic, we use labels (i.e., tags). Currently, these labels are free text, but as the number of posts increase, we may attempt to be more structured about it. Blogger’s statistics help us track the pageviews. As of February 24, the blog already had 3,691 page views since its launch! To disseminate posts, we also tweet them using the hashtag #MLAUXCaucus.

As of February 28, 2022, seven tips have been published on the following topics:

• Tip #1: Bulk export from Google Scholar
• Tip #2: Check for erroneous computer indexing in Embase
• Tip #3: Search modes in EBSCO CINAHL
• Tip#4: Ovid MEDLINE adjacency and field tags
• Tip #5: The Trouble with Curly Quotes
• Tip #6: Using Covidence to track and report snowballed references for the PRISMA 2020 flow diagram
• Tip #7: Bulk Export from ProQuest

The Tip Sheets are also starting to get noticed by vendors; for example, Covidence is incorporating the last tip into its documentation.

If you’re interested in contributing, contact Kate Saylor or Andy Hickner.