Integrative Medicine Resources

Quick PubMed Tips to Refine Searches

Hints for Improving Search Results

No Results or Too Few Results

• Look for misspellings in your strategy.
• Decrease the number of concepts searched.
• Try a broader search term.
• Use a term from the thesaurus (i.e., MeSH or subject heading list) for searching. Select a citation of interest and click the title to see the Abstract Display (or select citations, add to the Clipboard, go to the Clipboard, and click Display Settings and change to abstract view). Below the abstract, scroll to the MeSH terms section. Click on Terms of Interest and add search terms. For more information, see the MeSH tab.
• Use the Similar Articles feature.
• Check for missing or incorrect field qualifiers.
• Remove terms that are unlikely to be used by an author.
• Replace terms that are too general or too specific.
• Increase the number of synonyms or alternatives for a term.
• Use a truncation symbol at the end of a term to pick up variant endings.  The asterisk (*) is the truncation symbol used in PubMed.  Example:  asthm* will retrieve asthma or asthmatic.
• Try running the search on earlier years of the database.
• Try a different database.
   

Too Many Results

• Choose the most specific subject headings or most significant keywords.
• Use subheadings to narrow the focus of the subject heading if appropriate.
• Increase the number of search concepts that are AND-ed together.
• Use fewer synonyms for terms.
• Make a term from the thesaurus (i.e. subject heading list or controlled vocabulary) the main focus of the article ("major" in PubMed).
• Limit to Review articles by using Filters.
• Limit your search to article type, language, age group, publication date, etc., by using Filters.
• Ask for significant words to be in the TITLE of the article.