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Medline and EndNote Online: basics

Part 2B: Medline - Further Details

MeSH ? 

  • MeSH are Medical Subject Headings - or thesaurus or indexing terms - and form a structure for databases such as Medline.  They will help you find articles on the same topics.
  • MeSH may have narrower topics nested within them (a bit like Russian dolls): tick Explode to include these as well. The narrower topics will be indented further to the right than the broader heading. 
  • You can click on the heading itself, or use the Scope note at the right for a definition of the term and other information. 
  • The following images are screenshots of the subject heading pages, showing where to find the Scope note - far right of the screen - and the Explode box, which is the first box on the right hand half of the screen.  

MeSH term

Blood transfusion MeSH subject tree

Once you have searched for all of your concepts, you will need to combine them as before, using OR, then AND as appropriate. 

Watch this Panopto video on freetext searching on Medline. Includes sub-titles.

FREETEXT searches: or, an alternative to "MeSH"  

If there is no relevant subject heading for your concept, you can use free text/keyword searching – to do this, untick the Map Term to Subject Heading box, and type your keyword(s) into the search box.

  • Use the OR function to combine related terms - eg GP OR "family doctor" OR "family physician"
  • Use the * (truncation) to indicate alternative word endings - eg therap* for therapy, therapies, therapist and so on
  • Use adjn for adjacency, e.g. family adj2 therap* - to find articles where the word 'family' occurs within two words of therapy/therapies/therapist etc

Panopto videos from Academic Skills, University of Birmingham, on Saving the search history in Medline, and exporting results (including to EndNote Online).  Include sub-titles.

Save Results

To save individual results, or sets of results, tick the box for "All" above the list of results in a Medline search, or individual boxes.

  • Then choose Print, Email or Export
  • To save results to EndNote Online (or other reference management software), choose Export and 'RIS' in the drop-down menu.  In EndNote Online, upload this file using Collect - Import References; use RefMan RIS as Import Option for the upload

Selecting results for export in Medline

Save Search History

To save the whole search history - that is, everything you've been doing - go for "Save all" under the summary of the searches and then create an account with Ovid.  Add a search name and save the search to run again later.

 

Ovid personal account screen

 

Medline search name

 

Medline saved search to run

 

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