Revising a Term List

Now, you’ve gathered terms from the MeSH database and a relevant article. You may need to revise some of the terms or add additional forms of the terms to your search.

Consider the instructions and tips on the following tutorial pages. Some of the instructions will not apply to the search you’re preparing today. However, they may be important for other searches in the future.

Speaking/Writing Order

A keyword search is created to search the title and abstract written by the author.  You need words/terms that are in ‘reading/writing/speaking’ order for your search.

• If your list includes terms in ‘indexing’ order, change the word order to writing/speaking order.

For example, if–

Syndrome, Wissler’s

–was one of the terms for your concept, you would change the word order for that term into speaking/writing order —

“wissler’s syndrome”

Any phrases in your list that contain commas are probably in indexing order.

Eponyms

When dealing with eponymous disease names (diseases named after people), like —

“wissler’s syndrome”

— consider using the eponym, followed by an asterisk, and a title/abstract tag [tiab], e.g. —

wissler*[tiab]

Why use wissler*[tiab]?

• By removing the word “syndrome,” you will make it possible to retrieve records that contain the phrase “wissler’s disease” or “Wissler’s triad” instead of “wissler’s syndrome”  without typing all of these phrases into your search.
• By truncating, you make it possible to retrieve records containing, “wissler’s syndrome,” “wissler syndrome,” or “wisslers syndrome” with one search term.  Asterisks work inside quotes, but they only work for terminal truncation (at the end of the phrase).  “NG tube*” works.  “Wissler* syndrome” doesn’t work.
• By using the title/abstract tag [tiab], you keep the search from looking for Wissler in the author field.

Words That Might be Found in an Address

Does your term list include any words that might be found in an address.  Terms like the hospital, center, road, Philadelphia are frequently found in the authors’ address field.

• Add [tiab] after any such terms to limit their use to a search of the title and abstract field.  For example:

Philadelphia*[tiab]

is one of the terms in the “chronic” subconcept in the strategy developed for the “CML” concept during class.

Is the Term Specific Enough?

On occasion, keyword/s and keyphrases you find in the MeSH database or other sources are not appropriate for your search.

The broader headings in MeSH trees, for example, are usually too broad to be helpful. You may need to read a bit about your topic, and you may need to ‘play’ with your search a bit before you know which of the terms are relevant and specific enough for your search.

Include Relevant Variants of Terms

Once you have a list of terms that an author might use to indicate that s/he is talking about your “resistance” concept/s, you need to think about the different forms of those terms that might also be used.

Either (1) add all the search term variants specified below to your search, or (2) use truncation and the asterisk * wildcard  to make sure that the term/s included in your search will retrieve a record containing any of these term variants (the examples given don’t apply to your search).

• standard abbreviations
• full-length versions of any abbreviated terms
• plural and singular forms
• verb forms of nouns and vice versa
• alternative verb forms (apply, applies, applied, applying)
• adjective forms of nouns and vice versa (anemic, anemia)
• adverb forms of adjectives and vice versa (quick, quickly)
• British and American spellings (anemic, anaemic; edema, oedema; pediatric, paediatric; anesthesia, anaesthesia; center, centre; etc.)
• opposites and pseudo-opposites when appropriate (One example is including safety terms in a search concerning adverse effects. Another example is adding — OR anti-epileptic* OR anti-convulsant* OR antiepileptic* OR anticonvulsant* — to a list of epilepsy terms.)

Remove Unneeded Terms

Remove unnecessary words from any multi-word phrases.

For example, if you were searching for articles about a drug therapy for obesity, you might find that —

“abdominal fat thickness”

–is sometimes used by authors to indicate that they were talking about obesity. In your search, however, rather than using–“abdominal fat thickness” — it would be better to use —

“abdominal fat”

If you use “abdominal fat” in your search you can retrieve records containing —

“abdominal fat thickness”

— and also records containing —

“abdominal fat measurements”
“centimeters of abdominal fat“

To restate the admonition above, avoid multi-word phrases whenever a single word (or shorter portion) of the phrase is just as indicative of the concept.

Enclose Multi-Word Phrases in Quotation Marks

• Enclose multi-word (space-containing) phrases  in quotes or hyphenate the words. For example,

“abdominal fat”

abdominal-fat

• Do not enclose single-word terms in quotes.

If you enclose a term in quotes, PubMed will not translate it to the corresponding heading, and translation can be helpful. (Translation just adds additional terms to your search — it doesn’t replace your term)

• The exception to my advice to avoid quotes around single-word terms is the use of “not”  as a keyword.  If you want to use “not” as a search term rather than as an operator, surround it with quotes.  (“or” and “and” can also be used as a keywords,  but they come up so frequently in writing that they are unlikely to be useful in any search.)

Argh!  Too Many Phrases

Do you have lots of phrases  that will need to be included in multiple forms?  For example:  “diminished response”, “no response” , “no effect”,  etc.

• Consider replacing these phrases with a multiple subconcept term like:

((diminish* OR no) AND (effect* OR respons*))

• Did you find other words that could be added to the two-subconcept term above?