Tutorial: PubMed Glossary

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Glossary

Boolean Operators (named for George Boole, 1815-1864, a mathematician) - combining terms such as AND, OR, and NOT used in building a search statement or in putting several sets together.

Citation a bibliographic representation of a journal article or a book chapter, etc; one unit in a bibliographic database. It includes many fields, such as the author, article title, journal title, year, volume, issue and page nuimbers and is the information you need to locate the article or book. Synonym of Record.

Entrez date the date that a record is entered into the Entrez database

Explosion the automatic OR ing together of a MeSH term and the narrower terms associated with it. Example: explode aged will OR together "aged", "aged, 80 and over", and "frail elderly". Without exploding, one would retrieve only the broader term itself and not any of the more specific terms that might have been assigned by the indexer.

Field one of many units in a record (or citation) in a database. In PubMed, fields include author, title, source (journal name, year, volume, pages), abstract, publication type, language, etc.

Indexed assigned controlled vocabulary terms; or Indexed By - chosen for inclusion in a particular database.

ISSN International Standard Serial Number - a unique number assigned to represent a journal title.

Journal a periodical (or magazine) published on a regular basis. A scholarly journal often contains articles that were reviewed by other scholars before being accepted for publication.

Major MeSH a controlled vocabulary term that is one of the most important concepts covered in the article represented in the record.

Major Topic Terms Some MeSH terms are assigned as Major Topic terms, meaning that the indexer has determined that these terms represent the major thrust of the document. Using the Major Topic field in the MeSH Browser can help you discard documents that are less relevant to your search.

MEDLINE Medline is the National Library of Medicine's (NLM) premier bibliographic database covering the fields of medicine, nursing, dentistry, veterinary medicine, the health care system, and the preclinical sciences as far back as 1966.

MeSH a Medical Subject Heading. A controlled vocabulary term used by all the indexers in an organization to ensure consistency in assigning terms to articles (or records) on the same topic. They are also used in searching to avoid having to think of all the possible words that various authors could have used to expresse the same concept. For example, the MeSH heading AGED is assigned instead of aging, older, elderly, senior citizen, geriatric person, etc. that might appear in the title or abstract of the article.

Premedline - PREMEDLINE is the NLM database that provides basic citation information and abstracts before the full records are prepared and added to MEDLINE.

Query box a box in which you enter a search term before clicking on [search] or [enter].

Record a collection of data about a single unit in a database; in PubMed, each record represents one journal article. Synonym of Citation. Each record or citation is composed of many fields.

Serial a publication that is issued on a regular basis

Set all the records meeting your search criteria. Sets are combined with AND, OR, or NOT depending on whether you require the search terms from both sets to be included, you want either or both of the terms included, or you want only the terms from one set and NOT the ones from the other set.

Subheading - A term used with MeSH headings to help focus on a specific aspect of the subject. For example, subheadings for a disease could be, complications, drug-therapy, diagnosis, etc.

Term mapping the automatic linking from a word or phrase that is not a MeSH term to one that is a MeSH term.

Truncation the shortening of a term to its root with the addition of a symbol to represent all possible endings to that term; for example toxic* would search for toxic, toxicology, toxicologist, etc. In some fields, such as the author field, truncation is automatic. Searching for Smith A would also retrieve articles by Smith AB, Smith AC, etc.