For those of you who do advanced PubMed searching - has wondering how to float a subheading in PubMed kept you up at night? Have you tossed and turned thinking "there must be a way!", yet resorted to Ovid's .fs. command time after time? Rejoice! You can sleep well tonight because the secret is now revealed! Or maybe you already knew how to do it, and I'm just behind the curve. :)
In the MeSH browser in PubMed, you can look up subheadings as well as MeSH terms. I've done this for years to see the tree structure of a subheading, but it didn't click until just recently that THIS is how you can float a subheading in PubMed.
For example, if you're interested in floating the subheading "diagnosis" in your search, look up "diagnosis" in the MeSH database and select the one that says "diagnosis[subheading]". Then, just send it to the search box like you would a normal subject heading. Search PubMed, and it will pick up all the articles that have this subheading attached, regardless of which MeSH heading the subheading is attached to. You can then combine this floated subheading with the rest of the MeSH headings/keywords in your search.
There you have it! Too bad it took me years to figure this out, since it was right in front of my face this whole time (and, now that I look again, in the PubMed "help" - but I swear it wasn't there the last time I was trying to figure out if this could be done). Let me know if you have any questions!
Liz
Posted by biomedref at May 4, 2007 08:52 AM