zaterdag 16 april 2016

Constanly changing interfaces

I don't do blog posts often but i definitely feel the need to write this down.

Why do search interfaces change all the time, and so all of a sudden. People get used to working in a certain way, manuals are adapted to that, with convenient screen shots, sometimes even journal articles are written explaining steps to take (I am currently in the process of writing several). And then all of a sudden a database provider changes the interface of their database completely.

Today embase.com changed the interface of their thesaurus, emtree. I must say I am a big fan of embase.com, I could not do my job the way I do it without them, and their up until now great interface and relevance ranking.

An important part of my method, which is the topic of my upcoming thesis is collecting thesaurus terms and synonyms from the databases into a word document. Now in the first version of emtree that was there when I developed my method we could easily copy emtree terms. A few months ago they made some change, which make it much harder to copy terms, but I guess we could live with it, if that is what their users want.

Now today they really messed up. Terms can almost only be combined using the interface, synonyms are much harder to find (requiring many extra clicks), and worst of all emtree terms can only be searched using the exact given synonyms in the database. Searching for a part of the term that is not the beginning of the term does not retrieve that term (such as effectiveness does not retrieve clinical effectiveness, program effectiveness like it used to.

I can live with changes in databases if they change for the better, but this is making life much more complicated! Embase is in my opinion not a tool that is used a lot by end users answering clinical question, they use PubMed, no matter what embase does. Embase is used by information specialists in writing systematic reviews, and by medical docters who are more advanced searchers (have done a workshop on using embase).

I am thinking of switching to Ovid (never thought that would happen!)