The MSK library now subscribes to the eJournal, Hospital Pediatrics. This journal is dedicated to pediatric hospital medicine and offers the tools to help provide quick, correct, and targeted medical interventions.
Significant topics include reducing length of stay and lowering readmission rates, optimizing patient safety and quality improvement, caring for children with medical complexity and chronic illness overseeing pain management practices, enhancing communication among units and multidisciplinary care teams, reducing unnecessary testing, and standardizing administration practices, training, coordination of care, and discharge planning.
Boolean Operators (AND, OR, NOT) are tools for combining search terms and are inherent part of online database searching. While experienced searchers will use Boolean Operators directly in their search strategies, even novice searchers that just enter a string of terms into a database’s search box will end up indirectly using the Boolean operator AND, as each space between words will be treated by the database as AND, thus combining each term together into a search strategy that would retrieve results that have all terms present.
Most search strategies will either use just AND or a combination of both AND and OR. The third Boolean operator, NOT, is much more complicated and requires some understanding to use properly in a search.
Using the Boolean Operator NOT
The Boolean operator NOT can be used when a term or terms needs to be excluded from your search strategy.
For example, if you were interested in articles that looked at children with cancer, but you did not want articles that looked specifically at infants, you could create a search strategy like this:
cancer AND child* NOT infant* — or — (cancer AND child*) NOT infant*
The Problem with NOT
When using the Boolean operator NOT to exclude terms, it can become problematic when the database excludes records that contain both the term(s) you want to exclude and the term(s) you want in your search.
In the above example, not only articles about cancer in infants will be excluded from the results but it will also exclude any articles about cancer in both children and infants.
Information professionals (librarians and informationists) advise using the Boolean operator NOT with extreme caution when conducting searches. It’s better to reach out to an information professional for assistance with complex search techniques and how to best proceed with a search when there is a term you want to avoid.
Variations Across Databases
Not all databases function the same way, and using the Boolean operator NOT is no different. While most databases allow for using simply NOT to exclude terms, depending on the database or platform, you might need to use the operator AND NOT instead (Scopus), or once the search is performed use the Exclude button found within the Refine Search panel (also in Scopus).
Takeaway
The Boolean operator NOT should be used with extreme caution. It is best to consult a Librarian on its use in your search.
It is not at all surprising in this era of “fake” everything, that there would suddenly be a business need for “fake paper” detection tools. Along with “plagiarism detection” and “image duplication or image manipulation detection”, another potential risk to the integrity of the scientific record that many publishers are now proactively on the lookout for during the manuscript submission process is “papermill detection”.
“This term describes the process by which manufactured manuscripts are submitted to a journal for a fee on behalf of researchers with the purpose of providing an easy publication for them, or to offer authorship for sale. The concerns with these submissions include faked or manipulated data/images, the use of stock images, substantial authorship changes, and plagiarism, which is not detected because it comes from a translated version of another article.”
“stand-alone application that allows publishers to automatically screen uploaded papers against key indicators that suggest that the manuscript has or may have originated from a paper mill”.
Although this type of detection is not something that individual authors would need to use pre-emptively, other tools – like iThenticate, a plagiarism detection tool – are now being subscribed to and made available to all potential authors in the MSK community via the MSK Library.
The MSK library now subscribes to the eJournal, Hospital Pediatrics. This journal is dedicated to pediatric hospital medicine and offers the tools to help provide quick, correct, and targeted medical interventions.