Hi, this is Michelle Swapp from the Health Sciences Library. This video demonstrates how you can find and select MeSH terms or medical subject headings. This is the first screen you'll see when you click on the PubMed database.
So PubMed works a bit like Google in that you can just do a keyword search and type in terms and then click the search button. However, your search will be better and more comprehensive if you use the controlled vocabulary or MeSH terms. To search for MeSH, click on that drop-down menu and select MeSH.
You only want to search for one MeSH term at a time, so I'm going to start with polypharmacy. So this brings you to a screen where it's describing the MeSH term. So the first thing you'll see is a bit of a definition. You'll also see the year when a term was first introduced. And then if I scroll down to the bottom, you can see the medical subject heading tree.
And this just means that there is a list of terms and they go from really broad categories like therapeutics down into narrower categories like polypharmacy. So what I'm going to do is just add it to my search builder and search PubMed. Okay, so we've got our first concept complete. Now what I want to do is search for our other main concept, which is nursing.
Don't worry, all your searches will be saved. Right now we're just trying to get a list of MeSH terms to use. So in this case, when I type nurse into the MeSH database, you can see I get a whole bunch of different results.
I think nurses is most of interest to me so I'm going to click on it. Here again you can see that definition, you can see the year that it was introduced and if you scroll down you can see that mesh tree. So it moves from persons down to health personnel to nurses so broader to narrower.
Another thing you'll notice is this subheading options. In general I don't use those unless I'm getting a lot of results. So I'm just going to add that term to the search builder and then click search PubMed. Alright, so now I've added nurses to my search, but I think there might be more MeSH terms that we need to include surrounding nurses. So I'm going to search now for nursing practice and see what comes up.
Hmm, so there's a bunch of terms here too. I'm going to click on this one and see. where it sits in that mesh tree. So if I scroll down, I'm going to actually go back up a level to nursing.
And that's the one I am going to include in my search. So it's going to bring back nursing plus all of these narrower terms. So things like geriatric nursing, which I think will be really helpful for our search.
So again, I'm just going to add that to my search builder and click on search PubMed. Remember, don't worry, these are getting saved. We're just looking for MeSH terms right now. Finally, I'm going to do a search for nurse's role to see what comes up.
And look, there's one here again. Again, same sort of thing. I'm going to scroll down and look at its position in the tree, add it to the search builder and search PubMed. So now I've got a bunch of search terms. They're all saved in this advanced screen, so if you scroll down, you can see that all the terms have been saved, and that's what we're going to use later to construct our search.
Another good way to find terms is to, if you're stuck, just do a little keyword search. Click on an article that looks relevant. So that one looks pretty relevant to our topic.
And then you'll notice that if you click on Mesh Terms, it will expand down. So this is a good way to find Mesh Terms, additional ones that you might want to include in your search.