When you’re conducting an advanced search in a database, it is best practice to use a combination of keywords and Medical Subject Headings or MESH terms. Using both keywords and MESH terms ensures that you are casting a wide net to gather all relevant articles.
MeSH is the National Library of Medicine’s controlled vocabulary thesaurus. In other words, MeSH terms are labels or tags assigned to each article in MEDLINE in order to describe the content of that particular article.
MeSH groups articles about the same topic under the same subject headings, making it easier to find relevant information. Using MeSH terms combined with Keywords will provide the most comprehensive search possible.
MeSH terms are organized into a hierarchy called a MeSH tree. The trees start with broad headings and get more specific as you move down the tree. For example, Cerebral Palsy is the narrowest subject heading in the Nervous System Diseases hierarchy:
You can also use subheadings in MEDLINE to narrow that topic even further. For example, if you only wanted to search for articles on “rehabilitation” related to Cerebral Palsy, you could select that subheading (you'll learn more about subheadings in the slides below).
Most medical databases use subject headings. We will use MEDLINE in our example search below, but PsycINFO, CINAHL and other databases also use their own unique subject headings. For example, CINAHL will have more subject headings relevant to allied health, while PsycINFO will have more on mental health topics.
Please note: each database has it's own unique subject headings, so your search strategy cannot be copied and pasted across databases.
Follow along with the slides below as we walk you through a search using Keywords and MeSH terms.
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