Mosby's Nursing Index

Mosby's Nursing Index is a new database from Elsevier that indexes nursing and allied health literature from 1995 to present. It is international in scope and includes evidence-based practice, peer-reviewed journals, trade publications, and electronic-only titles. More than 2,500 titles are indexed, including many unique titles and some 200 titles not currently indexed by other nursing databases.

Mosby's Nursing Index is a sister to Elsevier's EMCare database. The new index, equal to EMCare in content, is offered on the Health Science platform, while EMCare is available on Dialog/Datastar. Both databases index the same journals, but the search interfaces are different. The Mosby database is primarily marketed to nurses and allied health professionals but also indexes literature from related disciplines such as physical therapy, chiropractic, and complementary medicine. Updated daily, it aims to assist clinicians in accessing the most current available literature that they can use to enhance the quality of patient care they provide.

A simple literature search can be performed from the database home page using the Quick search tab. However, to use the power of the database, the Advanced mode must be used. In the Advanced mode, searchers type their search terms in quotes, which enables the database to map common words to the EMTree list of topic headings. This advice and other helpful search tips are printed on a green-capped side bar on each screen for quick access. These tips impart how to refine or narrow searches, save searches, or work with session results.

The database's advertising claims that Mosby's Nursing Index is a database of abstracts and indexing. This could be why one of the search default settings is “with abstracts.” While nurses might prefer retrieving abstracts, they may not realize that their search results may be incomplete when using the “with abstracts” default. Experienced searchers will know to bypass this default setting to ensure that pertinent citations will not be missed. Other search default settings like human, English language, and dates 2003–2007 are common limits and save time for the searcher.

Available drop-down limit menus are complete and include age groups, types of evidence, publication types, gender, language, area of focus, animal study types, and molecular sequence numbers. Help screens, identified by an icon box with a question mark inside, offer brief but useful information. A main help button is also located at the top of each page and provides a full index to access search tips.

After the searcher enters a search term and clicks the search button, the search statement is numbered and the retrieved citations can be viewed without a second “click.” The search may then be edited or modified in a couple ways. A search box, similar to the details box in PubMed, appears, and the searcher may add or delete terms here. An edit link is also located at the right edge of the search statement and opens to the limit options. Search statements may be combined using the Combine tab or by simply typing the set numbers and the Boolean operator (e.g., #3 and #4). It is not necessary to capitalize these operators as the database is not case-sensitive.

As previously mentioned, results in the citation format are shown below the search statement. If a searcher, however, selects a record to view in full by clicking on the article title, the Back to Results tab returns to the first citation on the results page and not to the selected citation, as might be expected.

Tabs to view, print, export, email, order, and add to clipboard are available and familiar to most experienced database searchers. The View tab reveals the full record, and only the full record can be printed from this tab. From the Print tab, options to print the citation, citation plus abstract, or full record are available. It would be beneficial if selected citations could be sorted by journal title as well as by relevance and publication year. One might think the Order tab would “sort” items, but it refers only to article purchase.

The Mosby database has many search features that are also available on other platforms. Searches can be saved, email alerts can be created for given searches, and session results remain for eight hours. Users can export search results into a plain-text document, End Note, ProCite, or Reference Manager. A View Related Articles tab is also provided. When the tab is selected, a new search strategy is automatically entered in the search box and is ready to be run or edited. This differs from databases in which the “related articles” link retrieves citations of topically similar articles. A “loading” message appears in red to apprise the searcher when the database is working and to alert the searcher to avoid entering additional commands.

While the Advanced search tab provides the most productive use of the database, other options include searching by field, drug, disease, article, topic, and author. Searchers may also browse the topic tree to locate articles. For searchers who are familiar with Medical Subject Headings (MeSH), the terms used in EMTree, Elsevier's life science thesaurus, may not be intuitive. Truncation is available but disables the capability of mapping to the preferred vocabulary.

The database's claim that source titles are indexed “cover-to-cover” is misleading. A quick journal search found this claim to be only partially true. Individual issues may be indexed cover-to-cover, but some issues of allegedly indexed titles are not covered. For example, when searching American Journal of Nursing, volume 105, 2005, issues 9–12, are not indexed. Most searchers will not realize the omissions and become frustrated when looking for an article they know to have been published.

When a mediated search is done and emailed to a customer, the return address is no_reply@Mosbynursingindex.com. Because some servers may mistake this as junk mail, it would be beneficial if the librarian's or library's email address could be inserted to avoid confusion.

All things considered, this is a useful, competitive product entering the health database arena. Mosby's Nursing Index is available with a subscription to Mosby's Nursing Consult or as an annual stand-alone product. As seen with most new products, this database may need a few tweaks. Nurses, however, with a little training and practice searching the database, will be able to access the information they need to enhance their clinical practice.