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PubMed - an Introduction

An introduction to and guide for using PubMed - from basic research queries to in depth, personalized information discovery.

Develop your question and keywords

Ideally, you will already have a specific question in mind when you are searching for literature in PubMed. For the purposes of this demonstration, let’s use the following PICO question:

Does Medical Marijuana help with seizures in children who have epilepsy?

Population/Problem

Intervention

Control

Outcome

Children with epilepsy

Medical Marijuana

Other medications?

Doing nothing?

Epileptic seizures

Before searching, it can be helpful to come up with synonyms, as authors will describe the same concepts in different ways.

Population/Problem

Intervention

Control

Outcome

Concepts

Children with epilepsy

Medical Marijuana

No Medical Marijuana

Epileptic seizures

Synonyms

Pediatric Epilepsy; seizure disorder; Child; juveniles; minors

Medical Cannabis;

Medicinal Marijuana

Seizures; convulsions

Search using Medical Subject Headings (MeSH)

MeSH, or “Medical Subject Headings”, is the National Library of Medicine’s controlled vocabulary thesaurus used for indexing PubMed citations. Including MeSH terms in your search allows you to search for items by concept rather than by matching specific keywords. This can be helpful when there are many different words to use to describe the same concept, or when you want to eliminate results based on the alternate meaning of a word.

You can also look within an article’s record to find associated MeSH terms.

Combine search terms

Not all concepts have corresponding MeSH terms, and not all articles in PubMed include MeSH indexing.

If you want your search to be comprehensive, it is best to combine keywords and MeSH terms:

Population/Problem

Intervention

Control

Outcome

Concepts

Children with epilepsy

Medical Marijuana

No Medical Marijuana

Epileptic seizures

Synonyms

Pediatric Epilepsy; seizure disorder; Child; juveniles; minors

Medical Cannabis;

Medicinal Marijuana

Seizures; convulsions

MeSH

“Epilepsy”[Mesh]

“Medical Marijuana”[Mesh]

“Seizures”[Mesh]

 

See PubMed syntax for how to properly combine terms in your search strategy.