Biology

• "PubMed® comprises more than 36 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books. Citations may include links to full text content from PubMed Central and publisher web sites."
• Used for:
  • research
  • public health
  • health policy development
  • clinical care
  • patient advocacy
  • educational activities

"PubMed uses a process called Automatic Term Mapping to determine what you are looking for and matches it to subjects (including MeSH or Medical Subject Headings). This helps to expand or narrow your search.

You can see how your terms were translated by checking the search details available on the Advanced link below the search box. Scroll down and you will see that PubMed stores your History and Search Details.

PubMed also automatically searches for alternate spellings, such as British English variations." It also considers generic names for medications as well as singular and plural word forms, and synonyms.

• When searching by author name, use only the last name and first and middle initials. Do not use any punctuation. For example, if I am wanting articles by Erika Odom, I would search 'odom e' in the search box.
• When searching for a specific journal you will need to search using the complete journal title, ISSN, or the MEDLINE journal title.
• When doing a topic search, be as specific as possible, don't use any punctuation or symbols
• When searching for the latest treatments for a disease or disorder click on 'Clinical Queries' under the Find option in the bottom navigation bar. The add your search term(s) in the search box that opens. Make sure to look at the filter and scope categories provided.
• If you want to do a proximity search (searching based on how closely two or more search terms appear in the results) you add your search terms and either [title:~#] for searching in the title only or [tiab:~#] in the title and abstract.
• To search for human-related studies add AND humans[mh] NOT medline[sb] to your search term(s) or you can use the double not strategy and add NOT (animals[mh] NOT humans[mh]) to your search term(s).
• To limit your search use the left vertical navigation bar where you can limit by Text Availability, Article Type, Publication Date, etc.

IMPORTANT: Once you have found a resource that you want, you will see its availability in the right hand corner. If you are connected through Taylor University, you should see if it is available through Taylor. If you are lead to another site that wants you to pay for the article—DO NOT PAY! Zondervan Library can get the article for you through Inter-library Loan.

Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) are terms that PubMed uses to tag journal articles. All articles found in PubMed have been curated by a human indexer at the National Library of Medicine. Once they have read an article, they use the MeSH database to find the subject terms that most closely match what that article is about. When you use MeSH terms in your PubMed Search, you are going to find the most relevant resources. MeSH terms are searching for meaning instead of simply where a word appears in a text or an abstract. For example, if I am wanting to find resources on strength training, how many different ways can that concept be understood and in what context am I talking about? MeSH can help me narrow down my search, so I find exactly what I am needing.

A keyword search is good for quick searching and new concepts or ideas. A MeSH search is good for precise searching of well-established concepts or ideas and will include synonyms and variations in spelling.

Here are some helpful tutorials about MeSH terminology: