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Literature searching for Health Sciences and Medicine

A guide for medical, dentistry and health sciences students undertaking a literature search.

What are Subject Headings?

Subject headings are standard descriptions used by databases to help with searching. They help retrieve articles on a topic, even if different words are used in the text.

The whole collection of subject headings is called a controlled vocabulary or thesaurus.

Watch this video (4 minutes) on the basics of subject headings.

   How to: Find, check and add subject headings

Find Headings
  • Type your topic in the search box.
  • Select tickbox Map Term to Subject Heading

flue is typed in main search box. Tickbox "map term to subject heading" underneath saerch box is ticked.


Medline uses Medical Subject Headings (MeSH).
This searches through the MeSH thesaurus, then if your search term is not there, through abstracts of articles, retrieving the most common subject headings for your words. Many of these may not be relevant.

Check meaning
  • Check the Scope Note for a definition and more information.

Influenza, human appears in results lists of terms

 

Add to search
  • Click on the Subject Heading words

This will take you to the tree, showing where your heading sits in the hierarchy.

  • Select relevant subject heading 
  • Select only your subject heading - tickbox to left hand side of the title
  • Explode - this selects all subject headings underneath the current one - tickbox to immediate right of the title
  • Focus - this selects articles which have identified this subject as the major focus - tickbox to far right of the title
  • If suitable select Subheadings to narrow your search, Click Continue

Subheadings describe an aspect of the main heading to narrow the focus. There are 76 subheadings available, but not all  will be available for every Subject heading.

  • The subject heading will now be added as a line in your search history. It appears with a slash / at the end.

Results not changing?

If your subject heading is the same as a keyword your results won't change in the default Ovid search.

What's happening?
Ovid's default search .mp searches through the MeSH field and retrieves any articles which have the subject heading. 

 

So why use subject headings?

Build your knowledge

Become familiar with terminology and find synonyms (scope note).  

Focus searches

Discover highly relevant results. Good for exploratory searches.

Comprehensive searching

Remove irrelevant book titles, reports and subject headings.

 

 

 

Find Headings
 
  • Select Explore > MeSH Database
screenshot of pubmed home page with Explore - Mesh database link on bottom right hand side
  • Type your topic in the search box.


Medline uses Medical Subject Headings (MeSH).
This searches through the MeSH thesaurus, then if your search term is not there, through abstracts of articles, retrieving the most common subject headings for your words. Many of these may not be relevant.

Check meaning
  • Click on the title of the subject heading you are interested in. This will open the page with the Scope note, and where the heading sits in the hierarchy

 

Add to search
  • Click button Add term to search builder


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