Topic Searching in PubMed®: Using the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH®)

Class Experience Level
Intermediate

PubMed maps your search terms to Medical Subject Headings (MeSH), the vocabulary NLM uses to describe articles, to augment your search with additional terms. Designed for librarians and other expert literature searchers in the health sciences, this course will help you better understand how PubMed uses MeSH and how you can take control of your PubMed topic searches for better precision or recall.

By registering for this class, you agreeing to the NNLM Code of Conduct

Objectives:

By the end of this course, you should be able to:

  • Recognize that MeSH is automatically included in PubMed searches and demonstrate how it improves your search results.
  • Identify when you need to go beyond the automated features of PubMed in your topic searches (and when you do not).
  • Document PubMed searches for formal queries.
  • Explore MeSH and build PubMed searches using the MeSH Database.
  • Accommodate unindexed records for comprehensive PubMed searches.
  • Apply distinct techniques for special PubMed searches.

Class Details

Platform: Moodle
CE Credits: 2.00
CE Categories: SRSS Level 1
Class Experience Level: Intermediate
This is a National NNLM class.
Learn more about this class and find other upcoming instances:
Topic Searching in PubMed: Using the Medical Subject Headings

Class Contacts

Host/Instructor: Katherine Majewski
Technical Assistance: Catherine Staley