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Using Multi-Find Professional.

Multi-Find is a specially programmed search tool designed to search several databases of particular interest to chlamydial researchers and health care professionals. The professional version, accessible on the home page after registration and log in, is much more fully featured than the simpler version available to non - registered users.  Access to external databases is provided as a convenience for chlamydial and health care professionals and chlamydiae.com has no control over their content. Use of Multi-Find will be illustrated for retrieval of chlamydial literature on the NLM Pub Med and NCBI databases.

Pub Med and NCBI examples

Example 1. Simple search. A user of this site recently raised a question about whether mycoplasma contamination of chlamydial stock strains is a recognised issue and, if so, how could they be got rid of. This is a simple search in Multi-Find, setting it up as follows:

The resulting output from Pub Med gives 7 papers over the last 5 years, or 13 papers over an unrestricted time span, five of which are highly relevant to the problem of contamination of chlamydial isolates with mycoplasma, and how to get rid of the mycoplasma.

Example 2. Keeping up to date. Suppose you want to do a search on all papers in Pub Med on chlamydia covering all chlamydiae and restricted. This is the kind of search you might want to do once a month on chlamydiae.com in order to keep up to date with activity in the field. As "chlamydia" is a very wide search term, doing such a search over a longer time span than a month would deluge you with more information than could be handled. There are three problems here with conventional Pub Med which Multi Find solves:

1. It is not immediately obvious how to restrict Pub Med output to just a short time period;
2. You would have to put a lot of search terms in to ensure that all chlamydiae, including Parachlamydia etc were covered.
3. Using chlamyd* (to ensure you get papers covering Chlamydophila) where * is a wildcard, would give you a load of irrelevant stuff on Chlamydomonas.

To do this in PubMed without Multi-Find you would have to specify Chlamydia or Chlamydophila or Trachom* or Parachlamydia or Neochlamydia or Waddlia or Simkania plus the date restrictions as well as your search term.

In Multi Find it is simple. Just set up your search using the drop down boxes as follows and click on GO. Multi-Find saves you a lot of typing!

The output from PubMed can be downloaded to bibliography management software like Reference Manager®, or sent to you by email. However, given the ease of doing searches in Multi-Find it is worth considering whether you want to go to all the effort of maintaining your own electronic database. After all, PubMed (and similar) do it for you and Multi-Find makes extracting chlamydia-specific data easy.

Other uses

Multi-Find can be used to search lots of other databases too. These include nucleotide and protein databases, various dictionaries etc. Just put in your search term, select the appropriate drop down and restrictions and click "Go".

Example 3. Searching for a chlamydial protein on NCBI.

Fig 3a. A search set up for PorB sequences, all chlamydiales, on the NCBI-Protein database, for last 5 years.

Fig 3b Four of the six PorB sequence files in NCBI-Protein found as a result of the search.

You'll need to register with chlamydiae.com to make full use of Multi-Find, but registration is free of charge and minimal hassle.

Have fun making Multi-Find part of your reference searching habit.

NEXT Chlamydia patent searching on Multi-Find Professional

[MEW] January 2003