Undergraduate and Postgraduate Medical Education

Please find a quick overview here: MEDLINE, PubMed, and PMC (PubMed Central): How are they different? (nih.gov)

 The user experience is personal preference though librarians tend to choose Medline for large scale literature review projects.

Pubmed mimics the user experience of Google Scholar. It's very easy to use, anticipates what the user wants, but the results list is based on an algorithm so an element of control is lost.

Medline is often the choice for individuals undergoing systematic or scoping reviews because of the element of control, and the clarity of the search strategy presented in a very linear fashion. Medline uses both controlled vocabulary (think of these like social media hashtags #...if you click on a controlled term, you will get all the papers that have also be labelled with that term), and free text searches that we find using field codes.

• If you chose one term per line it will be easier to edit, but this is personal preference
• When you see a long list of suggested Subject Headings, consider writing them down, and only select multiple choices if they are synonymous
• Worried you're missing a chunk of your search on the website?
  •  Select Expand on the right hand side of the search pane
• The database times out after 15 minutes of window inactivity (remember to create an account and save!)
• Click off all the lines you want to OR and create a line of all your synonyms
• AND all lines that contain the total ORs for your final result list
• Filters are applied to the last line of the search strategy, so make sure your last line is the final results line you want the filters applied to
• Use $ or * as truncation wildcards to obtain suffix variants
• Use an adjacency function to find two words occurring in any order within a certain amount of words away from the other (see search strategy screenshot)
• A wildcard character [?] replaces one character with another character (or no other character)
  • tumo?r = searching for tumor or tumour

Medline = MeSH (Medical Subject Headings)

EMBASE = emtree controlled vocabulary

Published papers and some conference proceedings are processed at the National Library of Medicine, where librarians and other subject experts read and label articles with controlled vocabulary words and phrases. Like a social media hashtag, clicking on official terminology will return all other works with the same term applied.

A comprehensive strategy in OVID is comprised of 3 search elements: 1) Controlled vocab 2) keyword searching 3) author supplied keywords

.tw = title/abstract

.ti = title only

.kf = author supplied keywords

.mp = all fields (default)

Recommendation:

.tw,kf PLUS Controlled Vocabulary

EXAMPLE:

exp Myocardial Infarction /

myocardial infarction.tw,kf

heart attack.tw,kf