What Do I Do When My PubMed Search Isn’t Mapping to MeSH?
Review Relevant Articles
Search PubMed with your keywords and review the articles it retrieves. What MeSH terms are indexed with those articles? If any of them describe your topic, try searching directly with those instead.
For example, here are the automatic term mappings for the search prescription drug tv commercials.
Prescription drugs mapped to prescription drugs [MeSH Terms], but TV and commercials did not map.
This search retrieved a few results, so you can look to see if any of the results are relevant and will lead you to appropriate MeSH terms.
Look at result #2, which includes all of your search terms in the title: “TV commercials for prescription drugs: a discourse analysis perspective”.
Click on the article title . In the article’s record, scroll down to the MeSH terms section.
There are two MeSH terms you could add to your search: Advertising and Television. If you reran the PubMed search as prescription drugs advertising television, you would get more than 80 results.
Exercises
Search exercise heated pool in PubMed and answer the questions below:
- True or False? "Heated" maps to MeSH term(s).
- True or False? Pool maps to MeSH terms(s).
- Review the results for the PubMed search exercise heated pool. Which one of these MeSH terms could replace pool in your search? Select all that apply.