Thursday, April 29, 2010

New OvidSP

Some new features in the latest OvidSP

1. You may switch between Search, Journals, Books, and My Workspace anytime you want without losing the searches you have done under the Search function.

2. The Filter By widget on the right-hand side allows you to filter your results by publication year, subject, author, journal, and publication type. If you would like the filtered results to show up in the Search History area, you can simply click on “Add to Search History” which is underneath “Filter By”.

3. “Keep Selected” feature is nice. After you select the desired results, you just need to click on “Keep Selected” and those selected results will be kept and shown in the Search History area.

4. New results management options: users can export their results to Word document, PDF, text file, Citavi, EndNote, ProCite, Reference Manger, RefWorks, BRS/Tagged, Reprint/Medlars, RIS, or XML.

5. New email features: you may choose to email your results in one of the eight styles: AMA, APA, Chicago (Author,Date), Chicago (Humanities), MLA, Vancouver, Ovid Labled Citation, or Ovid Citation.

6. The “drag-and-drop” feature: To drop it to the desired place, you have to make sure that the red stop icon () has changed into green tick ().

7. The neatest thing is My Workspace. There are four components in My Workspace:

1) My Projects. In My Projects, users can store citations and/or full-text documents they found in Ovid databases, and they can also add citations and upload full-text documents from outside Ovid databases. The maximum storage space for items from outside Ovid is 50 MB. Uploaded files will be kept at Ovid servers. The Upload File function can be turned off if the institution does not want their staff to upload files to servers that are outside of their organization. A project will be moved to Trash a year after its creation date and will be kept in Trash for a month. After that, the project will be deleted permanently. But a notice will be sent to the account owner eleven months after the creation date of the project and the account owner can choose to activate the project to prevent it from being deleted. There are no collaboration features with My Projects for now, but it is something that Ovid will add in the future.

2) My Searches and Alerts. All the saved searches and alerts created in the old version are kept here. You actually can add the auto alerts created in the old version to My Projects if you like.

3) My eTOCs. All the eTOCs created in the old version are kept here.

4) Install Toolbar. You may install the Ovid toolbar from here. I could not install it in my IE, but I was successful with FireFox. The Ovid Toolbar only works after you have logged into the new OvidSP. With Ovid Toolbar, you may add citations and/or full-text documents when you are working with resources that are outside Ovid databases, e.g. PubMed, or the Internet, etc.

There is a side-by-side screen comparison of Old OvidSP and New OvidSP available at:
http://www.ovid.com/site/pdf/side_by_side/sidebysidecomparison-April5_newheader.pdf

If you would like to attend the training sessions, you can find the information at:
http://www.ovid.com/site/resources/training_ovidsp.jsp