PubMed
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Improve your PubMed searches!
Everyone uses PubMed, but there are some quirks to it that most people dont know about. I provide a couple of resources and some hints to help you improve how you search through that database.
- Hints
- Use Quotes!
Pubmed typically interprets non-quoted text. Sometimes it seems to translate quoted text too, but not as much. The craziest example is the difference between typing insula and 'insula' into the pubmed interface. For some reason, when not quoted, PubMed translates insula into cerebral cortex which is not quite the same thing
- Use qualifiers!
PubMed works off of xml structure, so you can choose which fields to search for. [tiab] after a search term only looks through titles and abtracts [au] looks through authors
- MeSH
Medical Subject Headings. The controlled vocabulary used in pubmed. You should be passingly familiar with this to help optimize your searches. For instance, MeSH is particularly weak in vocabulary words for human behavior
- Search Details
This is where you can see what actually was searched for in PubMed (any translation done to the words you typed in). Its now a box half way down the page on the right hand side of the screen
- My NCBI
A place where you can have automatically generated searches emailed to you. Very helpful for seeing what comes up in your field on a weekly basis. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/myncbi/
- Resources
MeSH Homepage - Medical Subject Headings, the controlled vocabulary used in pubmed searches
