PubMed is a smart database. If you plug in keywords into the basic search bar, even without telling PubMed to search specific fields, PubMed will automatically search all fields (title, abstract, journal title, keywords, MeSH) for those keywords. PubMed will also automatically search for subject headings (MeSH) and alternate terms that relate to your keywords.
A basic keyword search may yield thousands or hundreds of thousands of results. Ways to narrow the result set include using filters (date, age, publication type), isolating certain keywords to the title or title/abstract, or combining searches with narrower MeSH terms.
PubMed's Advanced Search walks users through how to target and combine all available search fields in PubMed. This can be especially helpful if looking for certain publications that have unique keywords in combination with a certain MeSH term, are about a specific topic and are published by a certain author or journal, or have specific keywords or phrases located in the title/abstract.
PubMed's Advanced Search also walks users through how to combine previous searches after reviewing results.
PubMed uses a specific set of subject terms, called MeSH (medical subject headings), to tag articles pertaining to specific subjects. MeSH can be used to help pull relevant articles pertaining to a certain topic, even if the articles use different keywords.
Search for relevant subject headings using the MeSH Browser.
Clicking on a subject heading will bring up the heading details, including which keywords map to the heading (these are called entry terms), when the subject heading started being used, and available subheadings. It will also show the MeSH term's place in the MeSH hierarchy, which can help discover more broad or narrow terms.
NOTE: If a MeSH term has been introduced in recent years, that term is a day-forward change and will not be applied to articles published before that date. In some occasions, the year introduced will be followed by a date in parentheses. In these cases, the term has been applied retroactively to literature published from the present back to the year in parentheses.
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