Comments on: Disagreeing with a PubMed Instructor about MeSH

By: Creaky

Creaky — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 18:28:36 +0000

Let's face it, librarians: Folks just want to search Medline like they search Google.

Medline is an elegantly designed database. It has a thesaurus you can look at, you can "explode" terms, there are 88+ clinical subheadings to combine with a medical subject heading. CINAHL, PsycInfo, ERIC, ChemAbs and EMBASE databases are also rather transparent sources. Harder to discover and apply are the subject headings used in Web of Science or Scopus. No, it is not a good idea to be "over" using MeSH terms.

As others have said, sometimes a MeSH terms does not exist for what the human searcher is trying to find. For an example, a gastroenterologist asked for assistance in searching on the term "NASH". I blanked on what the term means. (A car made by American Motors in the 1950s?). NASH is non-alcoholic steatohepatitis, and there's no formal subject heading for that term either. Plus in MeSH there are over 130 hepatitis terms. Pretty confusing for a novice searcher. Another difficult-search example is a search on "nursing and narcotics". If you search CINAHL you'll get about one million citations for nursing treating substance abusers. However, what this person was looking for was nurses who are themselves substance abusers and are swiping meds while at work by signing themselves into the locked narcotics closet. Eventually we found (in the CINAHL thesaurus) that what she needed to search is "professional impairment" but that took more than a few minutes. These are a durable examples.

But it IS fun to dissuade scientists from using Google Scholar in favor of Medline! It's a real librarian-victory!

By: Jon D

Jon D — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 08:55:45 +0000

Me too… if searching for instance for interleukin-21 i would usually search for interleukin-21 (mesh) OR IL-21 (keyword) etc… and combine with other relevant keywords. I was told at a seminar once, that MeSH terms aren't added to new articles straightaway, i.e. to get the most fresh research articles, you would have to stop outside the MeSH comfort zone

By: Jon D

Jon D — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 08:55:45 +0000

By: davidrothman.net » novo|seek (3rd-Party PubMed/MEDLINE Tool)

davidrothman.net » novo|seek (3rd-Party PubMed/MEDLINE Tool) — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 06:35:25 +0000

[...] “HRT” is something we know PubMed has had trouble mapping in the past, we’ll try looking for “HRT” in both ReleMed and [...]

By: federated searching in medicine « omg tuna is kewl

federated searching in medicine « omg tuna is kewl — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 00:31:22 +0000

[...] But getting to medical libraries and federated searching, David Rothman had a good post responding to Rachel Walden’s experience a while back about a PubMed instructor who was “over MeSH.” Apparently, because PubMed does such a stellar job of mapping keywords to headings, using MeSH purposefully is rendered obsolete. Of course, as David and others show, PubMed’s mapping is not exactly, I don’t know, remotely reliable. That’s not the entire story, though. Even if PubMed’s mapping was peachy keen and always perfect, there are a couple of small flaws in how searches are translated, in my opinion. First of all, there is that whole searching keywords simultaneously thing–as if you don’t get too many results regardless. Then, there is that lack of major headings thing. And, finally, there is that thing with having those little precoordinated subheadings. I don’t know about YOU, but if I am doing a search in MEDLINE for treatment of myocardial infarction, I find leaving out keyword searching, using a major topic, and having that precoordinated therapy subheading pretty dang nice (well, completely critical to searching and at the same time remaining sane, actually). [...]

By: Matthew

Matthew — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 19:35:09 +0000

MeSH not necessary? Perhaps for non-librarians and non-systematic-reviewers but for any librarian who wants to be sure that they haven’t missed anything needs to use MeSH (or EMTREE or Cinahl Subject Headings or any other controlled vocabulary you can get your hands on). I would expect this kind of argument from a non-librarian — the idea that information is not currently easily searched without some sort of human organizational intervention is probably the most important thing to be conveyed to everyone. Yes, PubMed makes KW searching more effective but ONLY because it’s including the MeSH occasionally. I would argue that KW searching should almost never be used unless absolutely necessary (i.e. no direct subject heading available or you have the time to sift through every possible item that could possibly apply).

MeSH too hard? Hardly. This is one reason I stay away from PubMed and prefer Ovid Medline: easy access to and manipulation of MeSH. MeSH is dead simple, when you consider the alternatives. KWs are easy but not if you actually want to find what you’re looking for. And compare MeSH to almost any other controlled vocab. I’m almost afraid to do any lit searching outside of anything biomedical since there’s nothing like MeSH out there!!! LOL

By: HubLog

HubLog — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 23:29:03 +0000

Expanding Abbreviations in HubMed

David Rothman reported on a case where a PubMed search for HRT wasn’t expanded to match the MeSH term “Hormone Replacement Therapy”, presumably because there are multiple meanings for the abbreviation HRT. The obvious thing to do in this case is to …

By: Amanda

Amanda — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 21:27:17 +0000

Knowing how MeSH works is essential because you still need to know when the mapping doesn’t work well, or does not work the way you expect it to. Example: there are separate MeSH for Fertility and Infertility. Typing either of those terms into Pubmed will get you the one you typed in, but not the ’see also’ note that is important for making the distinction. Knowing that MeSH treats these concepts differently makes a huge difference when you search.

Of course, when I teach any database, I always tell them they only actually *need* to know two things: my e-mail and my phone number. If they forget absolutely everything else, they need to know to contact me. However, having an idea about how literature is organized, by NLM or anyone else, does help me help them.

By: Heather

Heather — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 20:33:32 +0000

I am really interested in this thread, because lately I’ve been thinking about whether it is really necessary or effective to teach MeSH to end user clinican types. I’ve taught a few sections of residents lately, and although I know they’ve received library instruction during their medical education, it seems like most still don’t understand how to use MeSH! When I ask for a show of hands for who prefers PubMed vs. Ovid Medline, usually it’s about half and half, or sometimes a small majority prefers PubMed. Those who like PubMed like it because they get better results from whatever they’ve plugged in. The bottom line is, they’ve been taught about MeSH, but just because we teach it, doesn’t mean they learn it. So do I go over with them (once again) how to use MeSH and why you should do so? Or do I accept that they prefer keyword searching, and try to teach them to do it in a way that will hopefully increase their odds of getting good results (things like Boolean operators, not using acronyms, searching one concept at a time and combining sets, etc.)?

I’m even more inclined to abandon MeSH when I have a group of nurses or other hospital staff. Some of my users are very unfamiliar with medical databases and not overly comfortable on the Internet, and within the time I have, it’s hard to teach them about subject headings, plus all the other aspects of database searching like using the results manager, not to mention a general overview of library services. I had a very long, one-on-one session with a nurse a couple of weeks ago, where we went over CINAHL headings in detail. The other day, she was back, very apologetic, to say she had another topic and she really wasn’t able to use the search engine the way I’d shown her.

Having said all this, I think it’s preposterous that someone in bioinformatics would claim to to “so over” MeSH. For advanced users, researchers, and librarians, MeSH is an absolute must, and if you can’t learn it, maybe you’re in the wrong field.

By: Susan

Susan — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 17:32:19 +0000

I think MeSH is essential and definitely not too hard. Sometimes there terms that are not in MeSH, for example, “Acute Chest Syndrome.” But I think it is worthwhile to check MeSH first and only add free keywords to the search if necessary. I always show patrons and students MeSH – it is the very first place I take them to. To me, MeSH is even more important for non-librarians to use because it provides standard wording/phrasing, subheadings that help limit a search, suggestions in case your spelling and wording are off, and a brief definition for each heading so users can be certain they are choosing the right term. While I understand that it appears to make searches easier when words are automatically mapped to MeSH, I think it is an unfortunate thing in the long run because people are unaware that it is happening and might not realize that results using words different from what they used to conduct their search are still about the topic of their interest. I had a student who needed articles on decreased oxygen in babies with heart defects. She kept getting articles about anoxia or hypoxia (both terms used to described decreased oxygen) and was in tears because she thought she wasn’t finding anything. Expanding our vocabularies is always a good thing.