Graduate & Doctoral Nursing Research Guide

A very important feature to know about PubMed is automatic term mapping.

The video below explains how this feature can be useful for lower stakes or novice searching but could negatively impact research such as dissertations or systematic reviews.

"How does using MeSH terms help to narrow my search results?"

• PubMed will automatically look for different variants of your keywords, including MeSH terms, expanding the number of articles returned. 

• [MeSH] with no restrictions/checkboxes:
  • PubMed will return any articles that include your selected term anywhere in the MeSH list, no matter how relevant to the article focus
• [Majr] Heading:
  • Check the box for "Restrict to Major Heading"
  • PubMed will return articles where the selected MeSH term is the major focus of the article and will have an asterisk (*) on the term in the MeSH list of the article
• [Mesh:NoExp]:
  • By checking the box, "Do not include MeSH terms found below this term in the MeSH hierarchy.", PubMed will NOT return articles with the MeSH terms that are underneath your selected term in the hierarchy. (This is not always available.) 
    • Example: Doing that for "Exercise" would exclude at least 10 more specific, but related terms such as walking
• Sub-headings:
  • Used in combination with MeSH Headings to indicate that an article focuses on a specific aspect of a topic. 
    • For example, searching PubMed with pulmonary embolism/drug therapy will retrieve articles about drug therapies for pulmonary embolism. Pulmonary Embolism is the MeSH Heading and Drug Therapy is the Subheading.
  • Not all Subheadings can be attached to all MeSH Headings.

While the Pace Library has many resources on searching, PubMed also provides access to a wide variety of tutorials and skills information to help educate about how the database functions.

Some tutorials we recommend starting with from the pages linked below:

• Save searches and set email alerts
• Using the Advanced Search Builder
• Topic Searching in PubMed: Using the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH)
• Phrase Searching in PubMed Tutorial

For a very detailed look into how PubMed works, this longer video (1.5 hours) explores many aspects of using the database. The description includes chapter links to different topics in the video for easy navigation.