Searching the Literature

See what terms PubMed recommends

After searching in PubMed:

1. Click Advanced under the search box
2. Scroll down to History
3. Click the chevron under Details to see which keywords PubMed automatically tried to include.
   1. You can see that sometimes, in trying to be user-friendly, PubMed makes mistakes. For instance, PubMed searched for "acute" and "care" separately. We discuss reasons to avoid that in Advanced Tips

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From this we can see that we can also use:

• Elderly - aged, elderlies
• Falls - accidental falls

After adding the terms from these steps we now have the search:

(elderly OR old OR older OR geriatric OR aged OR elder) AND (falls OR fall OR falling down OR accidental falls OR trip) AND (acute care OR emergency room OR intensive care OR ICU) AND (interventions OR quality improvement OR medication review OR exercise OR environment OR vision OR footwear OR therapy OR restraint)

Search for your concepts in the MeSH Database.

Think of MeSH like a list of "smart words" (click images to enlarge):

• MeSH organizes medical topics into a structured system, like a giant dictionary of medical terms.
• Each Medical Subject Heading has official subheadings and related keywords (Entry Terms).
  • So, even though you search for "heart attack," the system knows to also look for "Myocardial Infarction," which is the medical term.
• In addition to providing extra keywords, you can also use the MeSH term. We'll discuss this further in Advanced Tips
• MeSH terms only work for searching PubMed/MEDLINE.
  • CINAHL and most other databases have similar index terms, but these are too varying and complex for the scope of this guide.
• Not all concepts will have MeSH terms

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To find the MeSH page for your concept at anytime, you can:

1. Click the PubMed logo to visit the PubMed homepage.
2. Click MeSH Database
3. Search for your concept
   • Sometimes the MeSH term for your concept will be what you expect, other times it will be completely different.

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After searching for each concept in the MeSH Database, we can see some additional terms are:

• elderly - aged
• falls - accidental falls, slip and fall

(elderly OR geriatric OR old OR older OR elder OR aged) AND (falls OR fall OR falling down OR trip OR accidental falls OR slip and fall) AND (acute care OR emergency* OR intensive care OR ICU OR critical care) AND (interventions OR improvement OR quality improvement OR medication review OR exercise OR environment OR vision OR footwear OR therapy OR restraint)

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