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Brian S. Katcher, Pharm.D., is the author of MEDLINE: A Guide to Effective Searching. He is the Public Health Pharmacist for the Community Health Promotion & Disease Prevention Branch of the San Francisco Department of Public Health and Associate Clinical Professor of Pharmacy at the University of California San Francisco. His interest in promoting the most effective use of MEDLINE supports a larger vision of evidence-based health policy and practice.
The most remarkable thing about MEDLINE--other than its size--is the amount of human energy that has gone into indexing its contents. MEDLINE is the collective product of a small army of indexers, who have, for more than 30 years, characterized the contents of more than 4,200 journals that publish information about the causes, diagnosis, and treatment of disease. Each of the more than ten million journal articles, letters, and editorials that are catalogued in MEDLINE has been read by a skilled indexer, who has assigned to it roughly a dozen subject headings, drawn from a controlled vocabulary of more than 19,000 Medical Subject Headings (MeSH). If you understand the elaborate indexing schemes that are embodied in MEDLINE, you can use this understanding to search it with a high degree of precision.
My book, which is available at major bookstores, describes these indexing schemes and shows how to use them. (
0-9673445-0-6:Product Link on Barnes & Noble.com.)Here are some quick examples to help you make better use of the “Medline Search Link” in the Quick Links box on LabExplorer. This link takes you to the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed. Here you can choose from more than a dozen bibliographic databases for searching. MEDLINE is the largest of these.
If, for example, you wanted information about the use of blood tests to diagnose chronic fatigue syndrome, you would first need to know how the indexers at the National Library of Medicine categorize papers about this subject. To do this, simply enter “chronic fatigue” or “chronic fatigue syndrome” in the entry box. Then, click the “Find MeSH/Meta Terms” button on the top of the screen. The Metathesaurus shows the concepts related to chronic fatigue syndrome. At the top of the list is “fatigue syndrome, chronic.” This concept is more specific than our initial entry. But this is just the beginning. After selecting this concept, the “Select qualifiers to focus search” button can be used to make this concept selection still more specific. Using this button shows that more than two dozen possible qualifiers that can be used with “fatigue syndrome, chronic.” Selecting “blood” and performing the search found 75 articles in English. A second concept could be used to narrow the search still further. The main point, however, is that searching simply for “chronic fatigue syndrome” in the search box would have found 1,800 articles rather than 75.
Using a similar approach, we see that “CD4 Lymphocyte Count” is more specific than “CD4” or “CD4 count.” Searching for papers indexed under this concept AND “smoking” (which is more specific than cigarettes or tobacco smoking) found 60 citations in English.
There is no single, perfect way to search in MEDLINE. However, if you search with an understanding of what is possible, you will not be disappointed. Take the time to see how concepts are named by the people who index the literature in MEDLINE.
MEDLINE & Search Related Links:
| Search MEDLINE |
| Fact Sheet for NLM Databases - Describes the various databases (including MEDLINE) that you can search with Internet Grateful Med. |
| Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) - The National Library of Medicine’s home page for MeSH information. |
| Medical Journal Web Pages - Some have journals have on-line tables of contents, some have abstracts, a few even offer free full-text on-line access. |
| SciPICH - Resources for evaluating the quality of health information on the Web. |
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MEDLINE: A Guide to Effective Searching is a wonderful tool to aid almost all of us who use MEDLINE. The book clearly meets its intent, "the promotion of better searches and, hence, better application of what is known." The 1997 decision by the Library of Medicine to abandon its fee structure for the World Wide Web has permitted much greater access and thus makes this guide so much more valuable. While the entire monograph has great merit, I think I found the final chapter, "Framing Questions," the most useful. The guide is not only helpful, but it is very well written and enormously practical. I recommend it highly.
Philip R. Lee, M.D.
Senior Advisor to the School of Medicine
University of California San Francisco
...a very well-written and intelligent guide not only to MEDLINE but also the broader issues of searching bibliographic databases. Anyone interested in improving their search skills and making the fullest use of MEDLINE will benefit from reading this book.
David Owen, M.L.S., Ph.D.
Library & Center for Knowledge Management
University of California San Francisco
...a clear and comprehensive presentation of the power of MEDLINE. This book will quickly improve the MEDLINE use of any health care professional.
Gary M. McCart, Pharm.D.
Professor of Clinical Pharmacy
University of California San Francisco
An old New Yorker cartoon was captioned, "I predict a great future for complexity." It is a gift beyond our understanding that people have worked for the past 135 years to perfect a system to organize the complexity of the medical literature. But that organization is of full benefit only if we learn how to use it. Katcher has provided a guide of great value that gives us an understanding of how the system works and how to achieve access to 9 million articles in a logical fashion. This is the latest gift for which "searchers after truth" can be grateful.
William H. Foege, M.D.
Rollins School of Public Health
Emory University
Even in this new age of information, no information is more important to the human condition than that which reveals new insights on health and health prospects. Accordingly, no challenge is more compelling than ensuring that participants have timely and efficient access to the best available research findings as they seek to move the boundaries for the field. This guide to MEDLINE and other bibliographic databases provides an important boost to the efficiency of the search endeavor.
J. Michael McGinnis, MD
Robert Wood Johnson Foundation
Many
thanks to Brian S. Katcher , our
MEDLINE Lab Explorer.
MEDLINE: A Guide to Effective Searching is highly recommended by the
Medical Technology staff at LabExplorer.
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