5. Practice Using MeSH
Scenario: You need to find articles on drug treatments for salmonella food poisoning.
To see the difference between searches, start with a keyword search. Clear the previous search. In the query box, type salmonella food poisoning AND drug treatment. Click GO.
You should retrieve about 250 citations. This is more than is optimal. More importantly, inspection would show that drug treatment of salmonella is not the main focus of many of these citations. (Some of the articles are about salmonella, but mention drug treatment of other conditions.) We need to increase the search precision.
Scenario: You need to find articles on drug treatments for salmonella food poisoning.
To see the difference between searches, start with a keyword search. Clear the previous search. In the query box, type salmonella food poisoning AND drug treatment. Click GO.
You should retrieve about 250 citations. This is more than is optimal. More importantly, inspection would show that drug treatment of salmonella is not the main focus of many of these citations. (Some of the articles are about salmonella, but mention drug treatment of other conditions.) We need to increase the search precision.
