6. What If You Can't Identify the Right MeSH Term?

Scenario: You need to find statistics about drug addiction among physicians.

Open the MeSH database. Type addiction AND physician. Click Go. No MeSH terms appear. Type addicted doctors or another phrase that describes the concept. The suggestions at the top of the page are merely matching the letters (not the subjects) you type, and are not useful. Clearly, this is a difficult topic to find in the MeSH database. What do you do now?

Pearl Searching is a technique in which a keyword search is used to find appropriate MeSH terms. Return to PubMed: Use the Search drop down menu on the left to select PubMed. Then, click Go. Click Clear to erase your old search.