PubMed Search Strategy

Subject Searching: There are three ways to approach searching:

· Enter keywords or phrases.

Putting it in quotes will tell PubMed to search the terms together.

PubMed does not do adjacency searching. It uses a Phrase List.

· Go to the MeSH browser and search in the controlled vocabulary.

This method is more precise.

In MeSH you have the options of subheadings, i.e. etiology, drug therapy, diagnosis, etc.

· Go to the Index feature, select MeSH terms, enter the term, click view.

Truncation:

· Can be used when you want PubMed to find all terms that begin with a given text string.

· Truncation is represented by the asterisk (*), sometimes referred to as a "wildcard."

· Truncation turns off automatic term mapping and the automatic explosion of MeSH terms.

Boolean logic:

· There are three Boolean operators (in upper case), which represent relationships between entities.

· Use the AND operator to retrieve a set in which each citation contains all the search terms. This operator places no condition on where the terms are found in relation to one another; the terms simply have to appear somewhere in the same citation. AND narrows retrieval.

· Use the OR operator to retrieve documents that contain at least one of the specified search terms. OR broadens retrieval.

· Use the NOT operator to exclude the retrieval of terms from your search.

Stopwords:

· A list of commonly found words.

· Stopwords are words that, if indexed, could potentially return every document in the database.

· Consequently, commonly found words are not indexed and PubMed will ignore them.

· Go to PubMed's Help to view the list of stopwords.

Search Field Tags

· Terms may be qualified using PubMed's search field tags.

· A list of the available field names, tags, and brief field descriptions may be found in the PubMed Help.

· Each search term should be followed (qualified) with the search field tag that indicates which field will be searched.

· The search field tag must follow the term -- you cannot prequalify.

· In the example, aromatherapy[mh] is correct and [mh] aromatherapy is incorrect.

· Tags are enclosed in square brackets.

· Other examples of tags are:

Publication Date [DP]

Affiliation [AD]

Author [AU]

Title [TI]

Examples of search strategy strings:

· Seoud[au] AND maternal[ti]

· ards AND 2002[dp]

Examples of search strategy results:

· acute respiratory distress syndrome is defined in MeSH as Respiratory Distress Syndrome, Adult

· Respiratory Distress Syndrome, Adult (MeSH terms) 7367 hits

· “acute respiratory distress syndrome” (with quotes as phase) 1592 hits

· acute respiratory distress syndrome (keyword search) 4340 hits

· diabetes AND pregnancy OR perinatal (keyword search) 38491 hits

· same string with limits: 5 years, English, Human, Core Clinical Journals 1342hits

· Pregnancy in Diabetics-with limiters (MeSH terms) 167 hits

· Diabetes, Gestational-with limiters (MeSH terms) 187 hits

· Puerperium AND Diabetes Mellitus (MeSH terms) 303hits