If you are searching for a phrase in PubMed, and the phrase does not map to MeSH as you intended it to, there are some strategies you can try to find relevant MeSH terms.

PubMed has a phrase index and will check phrases against it during Automatic Term Mapping. For example, the phrase screen time maps to Screen Time [MeSH].

If your phrase does not map to a MeSH term, you can force a phrase search in PubMed by:

1. Enclosing the phrase in double quotes will search for the phrase in all fields. This is how a search for “kidney allograft” is translated by PubMed:

1. Using a search tag, like the tag for title or abstract [tiab] . This is how a search for kidney allograft[tiab] is translated by PubMed:

By exploring the results and the MeSH terms assigned to highly relevant citations, you can decide on strategies for retrieving other relevant records. For example, this result from a search of “kidney allograft” reveals how this concept is described in MeSH using multiple terms (e.g., Kidney Transplantation and Allografts), and also suggests some related terms that may be useful (e.g., Graft Survival and Graft Rejection):

Note that if you use quotes or a search tag and no phrase is found, PubMed will break apart the phrase and process each term separately. Here is an example of a search for “dog wheelchair”, which isn’t in the phrase index, and therefore each term is searched and translated individually: