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NUTR 4365: Nutrition in the Life Span: Search Strategies

This course guide was created for NUTR 4365 (Nutrition in the Life Span) class.

About Searching

When you search library databases, you will use keywords related to your research topic. Then use the keywords to combine them using Boolean Operators into search strings (or phrase searching) to improve your search.  Boolean Operators are simple words (AND, OR, and NOT) that are used to connect and define the relationship between keywords.

Remember that the database can't interpret what you mean, so you have to be clear and specific with your searches in order to control the results.

PICO, Keywords, and MeSH Subject Headings

 

PICO Framework

Used to frame and answer a clinical or health care related question. The PICO acronym stands for P - patient, problem or population; I - intervention; C - comparison, control or comparator; O - outcome.

PubMed Health Glossary (Source: Wikipedia)

Related terms: PICOT, PICOS, PICOTS

PICO stands for Population, Intervention, Comparison, OutcomeClick to enlarge

PICO acronym for the model of a clinical question for a search strategy or systematic review of healthcare intervention PubMed Health

What is MeSH?

MeSH (Medical Subject Headings) is the NLM controlled vocabulary thesaurus used for indexing articles for PubMed.  You can use these in combination with keywords in your searching.

MeSH is:

  • an acronym for Medical Subject Headings.
  • the U.S. National Library of Medicine's controlled vocabulary (thesaurus).
  • a vocabulary that gives uniformity and consistency to the indexing and cataloging of biomedical literature.
  • a distinctive feature of MEDLINE: Description of the Database.
  • arranged in a hierarchical manner called the MeSH Tree Structures.
  • updated annually.

MeSH Vocabulary includes four types of terms:

  • Headings
  • Subheadings
  • Supplementary Concept Records
  • Publication Characteristics (or Types)

Searching PubMed Using MeSH Search Tags

Truncation Searching

Truncation is a technique that broadens your search to include various word endings and spellings.

  • To use truncation, enter the root of a word and put the truncation symbol at the end.
  • Examples:
    child* = child, childs, children, childrens, childhood
    genetic* = genetic, genetics, genetically

Wildcard Searching

Wildcard searches allow the database to replace the wildcard symbol with any letters that would make up a real word. It's like a shorthand way of typing every possible word that fits the pattern with OR in between.
 
Symbol    What it does   Sample search     Instead of typing
*   replaces zero or more letters at the end of a word 
  (this is truncation)		   comput*   computer OR computing OR computational OR... 
#   replaces at most one letter   ne#t   net OR neat OR next OR nest OR...
?   replaces only one letter   wom?n   women OR woman