Contact Us

Find the information you need, faster and easier than ever!

Overview

  • On or off-campus MCHS Health Sciences Library (MCHSL) streamlines your access directly when you login to the site with your credentials. If you know your credentials use the Login link located in upper right corner, and you will have full access to all information, such as:

  • Articles available in PubMed with direct links to full text
  • Library holdings of A-Z Journals list, MCHSL, OPAL and OhioLINK books, and UpToDate, Lippincott Advisor and Procedures, CINAHL Plus with full text databases
  • MCHSL Resources, Services & Requests, 3 unique Search Options, and direct access to diverse Subject Guides, Educational Tutorials, CME options and other information related to your Library Registration, Accessing Library Website, checking your Personal Account and Contacting Library Staff remotely and in person

Using MCHSL Search

If you want to cast a wide net, find specific articles, books, journals, databases, MCHSL Search is the place to start:

  • Implemented Discovery Layer delivers blazing fast results
  • Customized relevance ranking engine shows the most pertinent results first and option for filtering your results, and sorting them by relevance or date
  • Multiple Filters options order results and show different subsets of results
  • Multiple sources searched simultaneously, include more than just article citations

Sources Searched

  • The complete PubMed database of more than 30 million articles
  • MCHS Library's full catalog of eBooks, and further access to OPAL and OhioLINK consortia catalogs

Finding an Article with a DOI and Other Identifiers

Journal articles will often have a persistent identifier, called Digital Object Identifier (DOI) or PubMed reference number (PMID), to identify and locate its digital presence regardless of changes to its location on the Internet. The DOI consists of a string of numbers, letters and symbols that can be found in the article summary page near the top or bottom, or within the article itself.

For example, PMID 33245518, DOI 10.1111/wvn.12479 can be entered into the MCHSL Search box and you will be able to access the article full-text PDF, if available through the MCHSL.

MCHSL Search allows you to search for an article by a DOI (you can copy and paste the DOI or active DOI link into MCHSL Search). Other persistent identifiers that MCHSL Search recognizes include ISBN for books and ISSN for journals.

Advanced Search

Boolean operators are a set of commands that can be used in almost every search engine, database, or online catalog to provide more focus to a search. The most basic Boolean commands are AND and OR. In Advanced Search, you can use Boolean commands to combine search terms, and narrow or broaden a set of results.

Narrow Results with AND

Use AND in a search to narrow your results. It tells the search engine to return results that contain ALL the search terms in a record.

Example: asthma AND exercise

Note: Both the words asthma and exercise must be present in every search result

In Advanced Search, the AND is implied when a string of words is searched without Boolean commands. For example, asthma exercise respiratory symptoms is translated to asthma AND exercise AND respiratory AND symptoms. The words may appear in any order through a record in the results. Use phrases to make the results more specific and show up in the results as you expect them to be. For example, asthma AND exercise AND “respiratory symptoms.

Broaden Results with OR

Use OR in a search to broaden your results by connecting similar concepts (synonyms). It tells the search engine to return results that contain ANY of the search terms in a record.

Example: cancer OR neoplasm OR tumor

Search Order

Search engines follow and execute the commands in the order that you type them in. Be aware of the logical order in which words are connected when using Boolean operators:

  • Databases usually recognize AND as the primary operator, and will connect concepts with AND together first
  • If you use a combination of AND and OR operators in a search, enclose the words to be "OR" together in parentheses

Example: hypertension AND (pregnant OR pregnancy)

Note: This search will return results that contain 1) hypertension and 2) either pregnant or pregnancy.

Other Search Commands

  • Phrases can be used to keep words in the exact order. This is useful for searching for titles or phrases. Example: “Health services for persons with disabilities”
  • Parentheses can be used to enclose search terms and their Boolean operators to specify the order in which they are interpreted by the search engine. Search commands enclosed in parentheses will be performed first before moving on to the other search terms. This is also called nesting. Example: (“teaching hospital” or “academic medical center”) AND (“clinical guideline” or “practice guideline”)

Note: This search will return results that contain 1) either teaching hospital or academic medical center and 2) either clinical guideline or practice guideline.

Filter Results

Search filters are located on the left column of the research results page. They allow you to quickly narrow your search results based on commonly used criteria (i.e., Sort by Relevance, Sort by Date). Expending box 'Filters' you can choose other options. options beneath “filter results” on the left side of the results page to narrow results based on:

  • Source e.g., PubMed, MCHS A-Z Journals holding list, MCHS, Opal, OhioLINK books catalogs
  • Publication type e.g., article, book, book chapter, journal, and more other types
  • Study type e.g., systematic review, randomized control trial, guideline
  • Journal title
  • Year
  • Language

Clinical Search

Clinical Search provides you with the option to formulate your search using PICOT.

Help

Your Librarians are available for additional help or assistance to do research.