Searching Health Databases Effectively: MeSH
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Searching Health Databases Effectively - MeSH
In the previous module Finding Information: Health, you were provided an extensive list of databases where you can find information for your research assignment. The following tips can ensure that you are able to effectively use these health databases to find information that is relevant to your topic.
Improving Your Search: Medical Subject Headings (MeSH)
MeSH are a distinctive feature of PubMed (MEDLINE). PubMed's inclusion of MeSH allows researchers like you to use consistent vocabulary when searching for biomedical information.
Why use MeSH when searching PubMed?
Example: You want to do research on how sugar can impact cancer development in laboratory mice. In PubMed Links to an external site., you could do the following search:
cancer AND "laboratory mice" AND sugar
Performing that search in PubMed Links to an external site. may lead to some problems. A keyword search for "cancer" will not necessarily retrieve articles on tumors, and a keyword search for "sugar" might yield results on carbohydrates, or sugar alcohols, or sugar phosphates, or sugar acids, etc. How can you make sure that you are searching PubMed Links to an external site. using the right terms? By using MeSH!
In the previous example, using MeSH could drastically improve our search results. You can think of MeSH as a thesaurus for the database. When you perform a traditional keyword search, PubMed Links to an external site. cannot predict all the terms you meant to include; rather, it will only search for the terms you actually entered. By using MeSH, you are searching the database several different variant versions of a keyword simultaneously. This means that your search results will be more comprehensive, and more relevant to what you actually wanted to find.
Back to our previous example: rather than a keyword search for "cancer" and "sugar," we can perform a MeSH search for "neoplasms" and "glucose."
Want more instructions on how to use MeSH? See the video below, or consult the National Library of Medicine's PubMed Tutorial Links to an external site. to learn more about MeSH trees.
Questions? |
If you need assistance with creating a search strategy in a health science databases, contact your librarian:
- Nedelina Tchangalova, Public Health Librarian, nedelina@umd.edu