PHPB 8100: Research Tools for NIH Grantwriting (F31)

Boolean operators AND, OR, and NOT can connect your concepts to create a search string in a database. 

• OR indicates that you will accept any of the terms in your results. (e.g. dementia OR Alzheimer)
• AND indicates that you will only accept results that have both terms. (e.g. dementia AND elderly)
• NOT indicates that you do not accept results that include the given term. (e.g. dementia NOT familial)

These relationships can be illustrated as a venn diagram - here, an example of a search that includes variations of terms for dementia, variations of terms for the elderly, but not including the term familial in the results :

Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) terms are a controlled vocabulary of terms used by many resources in PubMed to index them for searching. (Think of them as "tags"!) They can be identified in the MeSH Database or in the PubMed display of a given article, on the field lines designated MH.

Not everything in PubMed is indexed with MeSH, so it is recommended to combine MeSH field searches with other field searches to collect additional resources that were not MeSH indexed. 

MeSH database:

PubMed display, see  :

Alty, J., Farrow, M., & Lawler, K. (2020). Exercise and dementia prevention. Practical Neurology, 20(3), 234–240. https://doi.org/10.1136/practneurol-2019-002335

Field Codes are indicators that tell the database to look in a particular part of the articles for the given terms. Without a field code assigned, keyword searches return search results from any part of an article. A full list of field codes can be found in MEDLINE/PubMed Data Element (Field) Descriptions.

This search looks for dementia in any part of the resource text or indexing:

This search looks for dementia only in the Title and Abstract fields:

Proximity Search allows you to search for multiple terms in any order, within a specified distance, when searching the Title or Title/Abstract fields. 

Use the following format: “search terms”[field:~N]

• Search terms = Two or more words enclosed in double quotes.
• Field = The search field tag for the [Title] or [Title/Abstract] fields.
• N = The maximum number of words that may appear between your search terms.

For example: "joint pain"[tiab:~3] finds results including joint pain, joint-mediated pain, pain in the joint, etc. in the Title or Abstract fields.

Truncation tells PubMed to accept variations of a word, based on the letters that are replaced by an asterisk, to find multiple relevant related terms in one search instead of typing them all out. For example:

• therapy[tiab] - tells PubMed to search for the term therapy in the Title and Abstract fields. 
• therap*[tiab] - tells PubMed to search for variants of words that begin with the same first letters - therapy, therapies, therapist, therapeutic, etc - in the Title and Abstract fields.