Expert search and support

Available provider interfaces

• Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature (CINAHL) covers nursing and allied health
• Medical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System Online (MEDLINE) covers medicine, nursing, dentistry, veterinary medicine, the health care system, pre-clinical sciences, and more
• Psychology and Behavioral Sciences Collection covers emotional and behavioral characteristics, psychiatry, psychology, mental processes, anthropology, and observational and experimental methods
• Library, Information Science and Technology Abstracts (LISTA) covers all aspects of librarianship
• GreenFILE covers all aspects of human impact to the environment

Supporting materials

• Basic searching
• Advanced searching

Videos and live session bookings

• Searching CINAHL Databases - Basic Level Searching
• Searching CINAHL Databases - Advanced Level Searching
• Evidence Searching in the Psychology and Behavioural Sciences Collection
• Systematic Literature Searching in MEDLINE on EBSCOHost
• Seven Steps to the Perfect PICO Search in CINAHL
• Creating Alerts in CINAHL and MEDLINE

For an up-to-date list of EBSCO training recordings please go to the EBSCO UK YouTube channel.

The current list of live, instructor-led trainings are also available on NHS Resources.

Available provider interfaces

• Embase (Excerpta Medica Database) covers biomedical sciences and pharmacology
• Emcare covers nursing specialties and the nursing healthcare professions
• Health Management Information Consortium (HMIC)
• MEDLINE covers medicine, nursing, dentistry, veterinary medicine, the health care system, pre-clinical sciences, and more
• Social Policy and Practice covers evidence-based social science research

Supporting materials

• Ovid NHS Resource Center
• Ovid Tools and Resources Portal - click on “Instructor led training” from the menu on the left on this page for free 1-to-1 or small group training from Ovid staff, tailored to your requirements
• Basic Search on Ovid
• Ovid Advanced Search

Videos and live session bookings

See the Ovid NHS Resource Centre for Basic and Advanced Ovid recordings. See under "Recorded Sessions".

Request specific topics of training from Ovid trainers at Ovid Coaching.

Find out more about the Ovid support offer.

Trip Pro

Trip was designed, twenty-five years ago, as a tool to support clinicians to answer their clinical questions using the best available evidence. This focus remains and a major feature of Trip is evidence-based content (with a focus on evidence at the top of the evidence pyramid). While the focus is on clinicians, Trip is widely used by librarians and other information specialists.

Trip uses colour-coding to highlight the evidence type and the highest quality content is marked in green. This is subdivided in to a number of categories:

• systematic Reviews – these are taken from a large number of sources both published and grey giving unrivalled coverage and include HTAs
• evidence based synopses – covering journal clubs, critically appraised topics and other articles, while not formal systematic reviews, that have undergone additional secondary review
• guidelines – Trip’s guidelines are global in nature but can be restricted to specific areas (e.g. UK, Canada) at the touch of a button. No resource has the diversity and breadth of guideline coverage
• regulatory guidance – This covers content from the likes of NICE Technology Appraisals and national drug approvals such as the FDA, EMA and SMC

Trip is constantly looking for new sources of clinically useful information, typically adding 5-10 new sources per month. Users are encouraged to alert Trip to new sources to ensure the site uses the best evidence in the search.

An important aspect of Trip is understanding how we order the results. This includes three main components:

1. Text score – simplistically, a document scores more highly if the search terms are in the document title as opposed to the body of the text. If two documents contain the search terms once in the body of the text, a longer document will score lower due to a reduced term density.
2. Date – the newer the document the more highly it scores.
3. Publication score – this is given to an individual publisher and reflects the perceived place in the evidence pyramid. So, NICE or Cochrane (say) have a higher score than a journal such as the BMJ and that scores more highly than a ‘lesser’ journal.

These scores are calculated ‘on the fly’ and the highest scoring document appears at the top of the results.

One final issue to raise, is full-text content. Around 70% of journal articles link out to full-text articles (for Pro users only). In addition to this Trip seamlessly integrates with LibKey which can boost the proportion of full-text articles, depending on the organisational subscriptions. 

Trip is IP authenticated as well as via NHS OpenAthens. To set up IP access contact Jon Brassey, quoting the IP address(es) of your organisation.

Getting the most from Trip.

The Cochrane Library is a collection of databases giving practitioners access to evidence-based information to improve patient care. It includes:

• Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews
• Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials (CENTRAL)
• Cochrane Clinical Answers