LibGuides: Searching Ovid: Medline: Saving your Search

Features for Saving Your Search in Medline

Tip: Set Up A Personal Ovid Account

Get more out of Medline by setting up a personal Ovid account (if you do not already have one). Use your personal Ovid account to save searches from any Ovid database, and/or create automatic alerts to have new results emailed to you.

Click on My Account, at the top right hand corner of the home page:
This will take you to a log in page:
Click Create Account, fill in all the required fields and click Create. Now you can explore some of the extra features available to you.

Once you have constructed your search, you can save it:

Click the Save All button underneath your search history.
Give your search a name. You can also use the comment field for any extra notes you may have. You can choose to make your search temporary (which means it is saved for 744 hours, or 31 days), or you can use the Type drop-down list and select Permanent. If you plan to use more than one Ovid database for researching your topic, include the name of the database in the Comment field.
Click the Save button. This will take you back to the search page, with a yellow banner confirming that your search has been saved:

You can also save your search as an autoalert, which means you can set it to send you alerts by email or RSS when there are new results. Before you save your search as an alert, check that the majority of results are relevant. It is best to only set alerts for quite specific searches — alerts with a high rate of false hits may be more of a hindrance than a help. If you are unsure, please feel free to contact the Wellington Medical library. We are always happy to help with creating alerts.

If you have a date limit in your search, ensure that it is set to Current, rather than to the current year (e.g., use: yr=“2000-Current”, do not use: yr=“2000-2018”). This will ensure your alert continues for subsequent years. If in doubt, remove the date limit.

To create an alert:

Hover your mouse over the word More on the last line of your search and click Create Auto-Alert.
From the next screen you can choose how frequently you wish to receive results, and in what format (Email, RSS or in My Projects — you can choose more than one option if you wish). For each of these options, there are settings to choose from. You can choose your own preferences or go with the defaults . We recommend setting the Output Type in the Email Options section to HTML. This will make the email easier to read. You can also tick the Include external resolver link box. This will provide a link for each result that you can click on to check if full text is available via the library.

Once you have opened the database, click on View Saved in the top right of the screen:
You will be prompted to login.
Once you have logged in, you will see a list of your saved searches and/or alerts for all the Ovid databases. Tick the box next to the search/alert you want to run and click the Run button.
A screen will flash up briefly , and you will then be taken to the search screen.

Note: if you are re-running a temporary or permanent search, it will add it to any previous searching you have been doing in that session (if you re-run an AutoAlert, you will lose the search history for your current session).