Phrase Searching in PubMed Tutorial

1: What happens when I search PubMed with a phrase?

Review Individual Terms (If Needed)


At this point, you may be satisfied with your search results. If the phrase doesn’t map to MeSH or you’d like to dig deeper, then the next step is to review how PubMed split apart the terms of the phrase and processed each word individually.

For example, these are the Search Details for a search of the phrase prenatal vitamins.

PubMed History and Search details for prenatal vitamins showing how the phrase is broken down

As a phrase, prenatal vitamins does not map to a MeSH term, but PubMed breaks it apart and processes each term individually.

Prenatal is searched as:

  • "prenatal"[All Fields]
  • "prenatally"[All Fields]
  • "prenatals"[All Fields]

Next, vitamins is processed, and it maps to two MeSH terms, so it’s searched as:

  • "vitamins"[Pharmacological Action]
  • "vitamins"[MeSH Terms]

Like prenatal, its variations are searched in all fields as:

  • "vitamin’s"
  • "vitamine"
  • "vitamins"
  • "vitamins"
  • "vitamin"

The search results demonstrate that this strategy also returns relevant results about prenatal vitamins:

PubMed search results for the phrase prenatal vitamins

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