Dentistry and Oral Sciences Source (DOSS)

at The University of Adelaide

Latest update by Mick Draper Jan 2012

This database indexes more than 200 dental journals. Many of these journals include articles available in full text, and more than 100 of the journals also have full text links to cited references.

Access to DOSS
You can access DOSS from the Library Catalogue.
Using a Title search is quickest.

You can also find a link to DOSS on the Dentistry Databases web site.

You can use this direct link Dentistry and Oral Sciences Source
Right click on the link above and then open in a new window or new tab.
From outside the Uni network you'll be asked for your Uni of Adelaide username and password.

Logic Grids
A logic grid is a way to organise your thoughts so that you can bring together the best terms for your search and ensure you are combining these terms appropriately.

We will look for articles on oral plaque in children?

Search fields
DOSS includes several search fields to enable us to focus our searches or broaden them.

Subject Headings or Descriptors
The terminology gets weird here as the terms subject headings and descriptors get thrown around.
All the citations in DOSS have descriptors added.
To access the list of descriptors click on the link to Subjects in the blue bar at the top of the DOSS screen.

Find the Browsing box and enter your preferred search term.
Notice you can ask for a term that begins with what you enter, contains the term you enter, or you can use a Relevancy Ranked search when you aren't sure of which term might be best.
In the search below I entered plaque.
Click on the Browse button.

The correct subject in DOSS is dental plaque.
The search engine was able to find this even though it wasn't the term entered.
Click on the link to this Descriptor.

There are broader terms listed Dental Deposits, Microbial aggregation, & Mouth--Microbiology.

If one of these terms is more suitable then you could change your search by clicking on the link to the more appropriate term.

Click in the box to the left of DENTAL plaque.
Click on Add to send this term to the DOSS search box.

Even though you clicked on Subjects to look for plaque, the term added to the search box is a descriptor, with the field tag DE coming before the term "DENTAL plaque".

Next let's look for children the same way.
Change the term in the browse box to children.
Click on Browse.

Click on the link on CHILDREN.

There are three broader terms that each include the descriptor CHILDREN, and a long list of narrower terms that are all included in the term CHILDREN if it's exploded.

To begin let's search without exploding.
Click in the box to the left of CHILDREN but don't click in the Explode box.

Because we want to find citations to articles that include both plaque and children, change the search logic from OR to AND.

Click on the Add button and the term will be added to the search box.

Now the search box has both terms joined by AND.
The resulting search will look for individual citations that have both of these descriptors.

AND Logic

The search finds 38 citations that can be limited using the Refine your results.

Repeat the search but this time explode the search on CHILDREN.
To do this click on New Search at the top left of the screen.

Browse again for the descriptor dental plaque and add it to the search box.
Browse for children but this time before you add it the search box using AND logic click in the Explosion box.

This time the database will again search dental plaque and as well as the Descriptor children it will also include "abused children" OR "adopted children" etc.

OR Logic will include all the citations that are in any of the sets

Do you also want to search for your terms in titles, abstracts, or keywords? There is also an option to search on something DOSS calls subject as distinct from Descriptors.

DOSS tells me that

DE Descriptor 
Performs an exact search for subject headings and author-supplied keywords describing an article.

SU Subject Terms
Performs a keyword search for geographic subject terms, keywords in articles, and generic subject terms describing a document's contents.

(DE "dental plaque" OR SU plaque OR TI plaque) AND (DE children OR SU child* OR TI child* OR TI girl* OR TI boy*)

There are several search levels, I prefer to use Basic Search but include the search fields such as DE, SU, and TI in the search.
Adding the extra search fields SU and TI will significantly increase the number of citations found in this search.

All Text searching
DOSS includes searching All Text TX.
This performs a keyword search of all the database's searchable fields, plus the full text of articles.
This is a very broad search and could be used when really comprehensive searching is required, or if other searches don't find enough citations.

TX "early childhood caries" AND (TX "bottle fe*" OR TX bottlefe*)

Proximity Operators
Proximity operators work by finding terms close to one another.
There are two proximity operators available in DOSS.

The Near operator finds words that are near each other in any order. You can add a number to tell the database the maximum number of other words that are allowed between the terms you want to search.

Using N followed by 4 finds terms near each other in any order with up to four other words in between.

The With operator
Using W
The database finds citations with the terms in the order in which you enter them

TI "mandibular advancement" W3 (appliance* OR device*)

asks the database to search article titles to find citations with the phrase mandibular advancement preceding either of the word stems appliance or device with up to 3 other words between.

and would find titles such as mandibular advancement devices OR mandibular advancement with a dental appliance etc.

Limiting Searches
You can refine your results to articles that have full text as part of the DOSS database.
If you do this you may miss out on articles that the Library has as part of it's subscriptions but aren't included as full text in DOSS.

You can limit to articles in peer reviewed journals.

Collecting Citations and Exporting
You can collect individual citations by clicking on the Add to folder link.

As well as adding individual citations to the folder you can add all citations displayed on the screen by clicking on Alert/Save/Share.

If you have a large number of citations to select, you can increase the number displayed at any one time by clicking on the Page Options link.

To move to the folder display, click on this link in the right hand column of the screen.

You can select all the items in the folder with a single click in the box to the left of Select/deselect and then export to EndNote with relative ease.

References Available
Articles from about 100 journals in DOSS include a list of the cited references. To limit your results to these sorts of citations you can select References Available.

You can adjust the publication date.
Click on Update.

Now the citations shown will have a link to the references cited by the articles found by your search.

On the next screen you can see these cited references and links to all the articles in the DOSS database that cite each one of these (9) references from the original article.

The first of these articles is cited 7 times in the DOSS database. That means it's cited by the article Diagnosis and management of obstructive sleep apnea and 6 other articles.

To see these 7 citing articles click in the box to the left of this first citation and click on Related Records.

The second citation in this list is cited only once in DOSS. Therefore the article that cites this is the one we know about already Diagnosis and management of obstructive sleep apnea.

The usefulness of this tool is to find similar articles based on the articles cited by the ones found in your search.

Alerts
Click on Sign In at the top right of the search screen.

Follow the procedure to establish a user name and password.
This will work on any EBSCO database (Academic Search Premier, Health Source - Consumer Edition, PsycInfo etc)

Do your search, then click on Alert/Save/Share.

Click on E-mail Alert.

Select the alert options including Bibliographic Manager format so that the alerts can go into EndNote.

Visual Search
This is a category style search for finding some citations without thinking too hard about how to search.
Click on the Visual Search link below the search box.

Type in a search term or terms.
I think it's probably best to search DE, SU, and TI for a broad subject area.

You'll get a list of up to 250 of the most relevant articles on the topic and some categories to refine your search.
The categories seem to change with repeat searches on the same topic.

You can immediately limit your search to full text and You can see the first few citations, and pointing your mouse cursor at the bottom of the list will scroll through the other citations.

To view more detail about a particular citation click on it once.
A summary appears in the right hand column of the screen.

Clicking on More at the bottom of the summary will give a full citation display including a link to the full text if it's available.

Click on a subject category to see a subset of the 250 citations.

To collect citations and place them in the folder point at individual articles in the left hand column.
Hold the left hand mouse key down and drag the citation to the Collect Articles area at the top of the right hand column.

When you have finished collecting citations click on the Add to Folder link.
You can then look in the Folder by clicking the link in the banner at the top right of the DOSS screen.

Cited References
You can use DOSS to find which citations cite a known article.

There is a link to EBSCO help in the top right of the screen, and online EBSCO tutorials are available here

Mick's Cochrane Library Tutorial

Introduction to Evidence Based Dentistry