Screenshot of the Scopus Database, shown infinitely loading the search and results.

why does scopus hate me i don't deserve this 💔

if any #medlibs want a true challenge, try and find stuff on how to create a dictionary booklet. no matter what terms you search, you will find millions of online dictionaries explaining the meaning of your search terms

Don't you hate it when your colleague keeps yapping using their nasal cavity when you are trying to focus

If you look closely to the very right top corner you can see this image was posted by Elisabeth Bik, which tells me this image was likely manipulated

I do know Scopus likes to do this weird thing where it adds brackets or spaces when combining queries and then telling the user they made a syntax error, I always recommend medsyntax.org to check for this!

Turns out I had to delete my cookies & cache - now it seems to be working again!

Just found a sysrev with a nice table showing the number of results for the search per database... where some results are literally noted as "Syntax Error"... AND IT GOT PUBLISHED? Is it not common knowledge to fix a syntax error and search again? #medlibs

Stop tempting me to cancel all my social plans during christmas break so I can reread the stormlight archive for the bazilionth time, please, my friends and family miss me already 😅

Always love a good infographic!

Relieved I haven't experienced this firsthand (yet ..), but I read a paper on this that had a very nice way of explaining how this can happen: doi.org/10.1016/j.ac...

I'm a very big fan of how this advent calendar so far has also shown me you don't necessarily need to be well-versed in the specific topic of a paper in order to spot red flags

It's been 3 days since I discovered an error in a Scopus search alert and I have been trying to fix it every single day, multiple times a day, but Scopus keeps getting stuck on loading new results. I am slowly losing my mind over this, it's time for christmas break #medlibs

Anna Abalkina's advent calender is not only a great way to practice spotting red flags around articles and journals, but also a perfect tool to make you realise your own tunnel vision.. just spent 10 minutes analyzing today's text and fully missed the lack of results section😂 #medlibs

"reported according to PRISMA", a protocol on OSF, a PRESS peer review of the search, more than just "we used Web of Science" but an actual description of the included collections... a beautiful example of what can happen when you include a #medlib as a co-author!!

Sometimes I find some useful sources by checking the Cochrane Excel with resources, or just by googling "grey lit water contaminant" and see what comes up www.cochrane.org/authors/hand...

Exactly what I needed to start off my Monday morning

Screenshot of a footnote on a page, stating 'This was once revealed to me in a dream'.

I would prefer a reference like this over just nothing at all

Searching for a very niche subject and finally found a paper that lists the exact information I'm looking for in a Table.... with zero reference or context. Not even a mediocre one, just none.

It will never not be wild to me that apart from this clearly not being linked, it seems people who believe this prefer their infant to die of polio than to have a kid with autism

This feels the same as saying "Rainfall does not cause leather shoes to spawn on your doorstep" isn't an evidence-based claim because there has not been a paper actively proving rainfall doesn't make shoes appear

Crisis averted... I forgot that earlier today I was reading up on Mendeley and I logged in with my old uni account which is now linked to Elsevier.. so Embase switched to a new account linked to my personal email..oops

uh... just went to save one of the searches i'm working on in my Embase.com profile and... all my search folders are gone? trying my best not to panick but does anyone else have this issue? #medlibs #embase

We should find some sponsors who would pay for an international medlib meet-up here (definitely not just saying this so I can visit Japan for free)

Could it be... my saviour?? I have been dreaming of something like this since the day I was born

A Brief History of Large Language Models - Dataversity The history of large language models starts with the concept of semantics, developed by the French philologist, Michel Bréal, in 1883.

Out of spite this would make me mention Michel Breal in my acknowledgments (who apparently developed the concept of semantics in 1883, which LLMs are based on) www.dataversity.net/articles/a-b...

Unsure what OVID's idea behind this is, but I know in Embase they mark them as candidate terms specifically to make it clear the term a) isn't used a lot yet and b) isn't part of any tree structure.

I was about to point out this! I checked in Embase.com and it is indeed listed as a candidate term. I didn't know these are also included in the OVID platform however, so that's interesting to learn

Update: I highly recommend looking up the term "Legendary Creatures"[MeSH] because it leads to some really fun sounding titles

Oh, now you're sending me into a fun rabbit hole of trying to find more "spooky" MeSH terms. So far I came across "Telepathy", "Witchcraft" and "Legendary Creatures" which I think is a different way of saying cryptids

Challenge accepted: A reader wrote a program to find fake references in books Hermann/Pixabay Following our coverage this summer of a book with citations that did not exist, we asked you to send us examples of other books with similar issues. One reader took the request as a…

Someone wrote a Python script - in I assume his spare time - to detect false references. Very interesting, but it also makes me wonder why publishers haven't already tried this themselves? Seems a lot more efficient than manually screening references retractionwatch.com/2025/10/28/c...