How to Search in PubMed: FAQ

You can find publications by a specific author by entering their surname followed by their initials (max. 2), for example:

• Watanabe G
• Rovers MM

Similarly, if you retrieve too few results, there are a few options to broaden your search:

• looking up the MeSH terms and words (in title and abstract) that are used in relevant articles and add them to your search strategyyou can also find relevant MeSH terms by using title words AND medline[sb] in your search (With AND medline[sb], you search all records with MeSH terms.)
• supplementing the MeSH term used with
  • a broader/overarching MeSH term (using no explode)
    Bijv. raw foods[MeSH] OR food[MeSH:noexp] ipv raw foods[MeSH]. The MeSH raw foods has only been in use since 2015. Articles dating back to before 2015 are indexed using the broader term ‘food’.

  • a relevant MeSH term; many MeSH terms have a positive/negative equivalent
    e.g. cervical rib syndrome[MeSH] en cervical rib[MeSH],
    mycobacterium tuberculosis[MeSH] en tuberculosis[MeSH]
• expanding the search by using other databases (biomedical or other) such as Embase.

When working on an extensive search, you may want to keep track of the search strategy in a logbook. You can do this with a My NCBI account (See Records tab) or by copying the search strategy to a Word document.
Keeping a logbook is also a good idea if you want to translate a search into other databases, such as Embase or Cochrane.

If you retrieve too many search results, you can limit the number of results by:

• using filters to search for recent articles only
• searching by type of study, e.g. by using Clinical Queries
• using more specific search terms
  • MeSH
    • searching for articles that feature the MeSH term as Major Topic tagged with [Majr] instead of [MeSH].
    • restricting the MeSH term with one or more relevant subheading(s)
  • Searching by word or phrase
    • searching for title words with [ti] instead of [tiab]
    • replacing search terms with more specific terms