Skip to Main Content

Searching the Health Sciences Databases

MEDLINE with fulltext via EBSCO

Searching

To create a basic search:

1. Enter your terms in the search bar

2. Click on the Search Options and select a specific search mode such as ''Apply related words'' or apply Limiters such as ''Full Text''

3. Click on the Search button and the results display

MeSH

MeSH stands for Medical Subject Headings.

These are the list of standard terms added by indexers to the article record to help improve search results.

Articles are assigned the most specific MeSH headings that describe the concepts discussed (generally 5 to 15). When there is no specific heading for a concept, the indexer will use the closest, general heading available.

Indexers can also assign Subheadings to describe a particular aspect of a MeSH concept.

  • Examples of Subheadings in this list are therapeutic use, physiology, surgery, and drug therapy.

The indexer also assigns terms that reflect the characteristics of the group being studied:

  • the age group, human or other animal, male or female

A record could merely contain the keywords you search for but not actually be about that subject.

Let's say that you wanted to research pulmonary cancer and cigarette smoking. Articles sometimes contain wording like this:

"Most research on lung cancer has examined connections with cigarette smoking. In this article, we examined pulmonary cancer and chewing tobacco."

These sentences contain terms relevant to our search, but the article is about something entirely different.

MeSH terms are applied to articles after someone from the National Library of Medicine has actually read the article. By labelling an article with MeSH terms, they are telling you what the article is about.

It is also important to search the MeSH terms to capture relevant articles that do not use the keywords you have entered.

There are 2 downsides to searching with MeSH terms. Both of them are related to time.

  1. MeSH is not retroactive: When a new subject heading is introduced, NLM staff do not go back through previous years to apply the heading to earlier citations. You can tell how old a MeSH term is by looking at the "Year introduced" field. MeSH terms that have recently been introduced are likely to have been applied to fewer article records than MeSH terms that have existed for many years.
  2. It takes time to apply subject headings to citations: For this reason, newer citations do not yet have subject headings.

For these reasons it is important that you search using keywords and MeSH terms!