Tip #27: PubMed Subheadings Continued...

By

ETA: Many thanks to Whitney Townsend for being a second set of eyes to check my testing strategies!

Building on our earlier post, Tip #25: Using Subheadings in PubMed, here are some more fun things to know about PubMed's subheadings... 

Did you know that PubMed's subheadings have their own hierarchy? You can see the full list of Subheadings categories in the MeSH database.

And just like you find with other MeSH terms, PubMed also automatically explodes subheadings.  For example, when you search "Blood Glucose/analysis"[Mesh], you are getting all of the relevant lower-level subheadings under "analysis" [Subheading]. 

This MeSH and subheading combo includes:

  • "Blood Glucose/analysis"[Mesh]
    • "Blood Glucose/blood"[Mesh]
    • "Blood Glucose/isolation and purification"[Mesh]
    • "Blood  Glucose/cerebrospinal fluid"[Mesh]

In the screenshot below, you can see that ORing the other subheadings in doesn't increase or change our results because they are already included in the broader "Blood Glucose/analysis"[Mesh] search.

If you are floating subheadings in your search, you may run into a search topic where you need to exclude lower level subheadings terms to improve precision. Just as you can turn off explode for MeSH terms, you can also use the same function for subheadings.

 
 
"analysis" [Subheading:NoExp] vs. "analysis" [Subheading]
 
Here's an (entirely made-up, probably not actually relevant for the topic) example just to highlight the difference:


 
Try it (click on the link to run the search)!
#2 ("Diabetes Mellitus, Type 2/diagnosis"[Mesh]) AND ("Blood Glucose"[Mesh] AND "analysis" [Subheading:NoExp]) 

#1 ("Diabetes Mellitus, Type 2/diagnosis"[Mesh]) AND ("Blood Glucose"[Mesh] AND "analysis" [Subheading]) 

Comments

  1. Concepción Campos-AsensioOctober 18, 2022 at 7:52 AM

    Does OVID MEDLINE also do the exploded search for subheadings? Thanks

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Kate SaylorOctober 20, 2022 at 1:33 PM

      Good question! I'll have to investigate and will likely make a future tip post out of it. A quick test makes me think that it behaves differently:
      blood glucose/an (60639)
      blood glucose/an or blood glucose/bl or blood glucose/cf or blood glucose/ip (60714)

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Tip #1: Bulk export from Google Scholar

By
Image
This post was updated on October 10, 2022 with new instructions for #3 under "For EndNote users..." For years, I kept hearing from colleagues that I should be searching Google Scholar as part of my systematic review projects. I didn't, for 3 reasons: I didn't know GS' search syntax GS notoriously does not allow bulk export to reference managers I didn't have a sense of how many results I should export.   Last fall, I finally said enough was enough and it was time to learn how to wrangle this beast. It turns out that there is now a third-party tool that facilitates bulk export from Google Scholar, Harzing's Publish or Perish . Here's how you get started: Download PoP for free Paste your query into the Keywords field Set your maximum number of results. I follow the guidelines on p. 135 of Wichor Bramer's dissertation , which is a great handbook for expert searching. Bramer suggests the first 200 results, or 100 if you are getting low numbers of res
Read more

Tip #46: Exporting Records from Clinicaltrials.gov into EndNote

By
Image
Many thanks to Ben Harnke, MLIS from the Strauss Health Sciences Library, University of Colorado (ben.harnke@cuanschutz.edu) for this week's tip!   Overview The following are instructions to export records from clincicaltrials.gov (Trials) to EndNote, with the ultimate goal of sending the records to a screening software, namely Covidence. The new Trials website ( https://www.clinicaltrials.gov /) will only export in JSON (Java Script format) and Comma Separated Values (CSV) formats. We will be using the CSV export format, the format for spreadsheets. These instructions are simply slight modifications to the Clarivate instructions for importing tab-delimited files (spreadsheets) into EndNote. Before proceeding with the following instructions, first decide whether it is necessary to export directly from clinicaltrials.gov to begin with. Cochrane CENTRAL contains records from Trials and is more user friendly. CENTRAL is limited to "randomized and quasi-randomized controlled tri
Read more

Favorite Features & Sneaky Solutions: A Database Tips Lightning Round: View the recording!

By
On October 7, 2024, the Medical Library Association's User Experience (UX) Caucus held a database tips lightning round. Watch the entire event recording! MLA UX Caucus Database Tips Lightning Round * (October 2024)  View presenter slide decks, the full chat transcript, and a summary of Q&A and tips culled from the chat: Lightning Round documents  (October 2024) The presenters and their topics, with timestamps of when they appear in the video, were: Methodology and Publication Type Filters in EBSCOhost Databases (00:40) Marilia Antunez, MA (LIS), MA,  Life & Allied Health Sciences Librarian, Associate Professor, The University of Akron (OH) Tricky Truncation in ProQuest Databases (07:15) Jocelyn Boice, Associate Professor / Collection Strategies and Data Analysis Librarian, Colorado State University Libraries Embase Query Translator (12:52) Molly Higgins, Systematic Review Librarian, USDA NESR What’s Included in Emtree’s /syn and /br (19:20) Amy Nadell, MSLIS, MA , AHIP-D, L
Read more