PubMed - an Introduction

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?

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

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 find MeSH terms by searching the MeSH database.

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

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