Pharmacological Action Terms

• Use of a term with the Pharmacologic Action search tag [pa] instructs PubMed to OR together terms from a list made up of a PA term and the drug/substance terms known to have that action.
• MeSH terms on the list are searched with the no explode specification, [mh:noexp], so as not to include narrower terms that might not share the pharmacological action.
• Use this search method when you want to include retrieval for all substance terms from the pharmacological action list.

• Remember, to search for articles about one particular action of a substance, search the Pharmacological Action as a MeSH heading, to retrieve articles about the action (rather than including the list of substances). Retrieval of citations indexed before 1996 is likely to be incomplete.

Note: If you enter a MeSH term that happens to be a PA term without using a search tag, PubMed will search the term as [mh] OR [pa] OR [tw].

< Previous Section | Next Section >