Video Transcripts : How to Use MeSH Terms in Your PubMed Search

Within MeSH, because again, it's nothing more than a glorified thesaurus, we're going to start by searching one term at a time. In this case, we're going to continue on with the same term we've been using previously, cancer. Click Search. And you'll see that we have a variety of suggested options here below.

The first term is typically the term that you're looking for, although not always. So be sure to read the scope note, just directly below. Because MeSH is a biomedical database, and PubMed is also a biomedical database, they tend to use the terms preferred by researchers. So rather than see cancer come up in this list, we see neoplasms, which is the researcher's preferred term. Click on this term to open it up. 

Within this term, a few things to point out. We have our same scope note just up at the top here. Again, always pay attention to this to be sure that you are getting the correct term for the concepts that you're looking for.

Below, we have subheadings, and these are ways to narrow your search down. If I wanted to find just information on prevention and control for cancer, I could check this box off and that would bring back articles tagged with just prevention and control specifically for neoplasms. In general, I recommend starting without subheadings and then adding them in as you need to narrow your results down.

If we scroll further down, you'll also see this list of entry terms here. These terms are what are considered synonyms for the term that we're currently in, neoplasms. Some synonyms, of course, include the term that we initially searched for, which is cancer, as well as its plural for cancers. We also see other commonly associated terms such as tumor, malignancies, malignant neoplasms, etc. When we do a MeSH search, we're doing the equivalent of a natural language search that includes all of these terms, which is part of what makes it a very powerful search.

Scrolling down a little bit further, we have what's called the MeSH tree. This is how all MeSH terms are organized. Everything to the right of our term, which is in bold here, is considered a narrower term and is automatically included in our search. As you can see with neoplasms, this includes quite a lot of other MeSH terms. Sometimes you'll find that using the MeSH tree, might be most beneficial to help you narrow or broaden your search as needed.

For example, if we started with the term neoplasms and realized this was bringing us back too many results, we could narrow down to something more specific. We could look at perhaps just an epidermal cyst. We could also look at if we come down here, neoplasms by site, and name a specific neoplasm by site that we are interested in. This will narrow our search.

If we needed to broaden our search, we would be able to look at the terms to the left of our MeSH term in the tree, to be able to broaden this search out. In this case, we're already at the broadest term in this particular tree.

To actually find articles that are tagged with this MeSH term, we're going to use the PubMed search builder in the top right-hand corner. We can add this term to our search builder, by clicking Add to search builder. Then we have the option to either continue on our search within MeSH to include additional terms, which we would continue to click on Add to search builder, and set our drop-down menu here to either, AND, OR, or NOT. For AND it's looking for both terms within the same article. For OR it will look for either term within the same article. Once you're satisfied with your PubMed search here, you can click on Search PubMed.

Please note, that I do not recommend making any edits to the search builder, as this syntax is specific to what needs to be understood by PubMed. Any changes that you make may change the search that is coming back and cause the MeSH term to map incorrectly. So now, I'm going to click Search PubMed. And this brings me into PubMed where I can see the total number of results that are coming back.