How to pick the right MeSH terms for your research?

Students who plan for a research topic commonly experience two problems, either an absence or a very exhaustive list of available resources. Both these situations are challenging to deal with and often result in anxiety among students.

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In such situations, choosing the appropriate MeSH may come in handy and save both time and effort spent on extensive literature search.

Let us understand what a MeSH Term is?

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A MeSH term refers to “Medical Subject Headings.” These are structured, short phrases or groups of words that have been created by the MEDLINE®/PubMED® database portals. They have been created to facilitate the easy identification of literature in any chosen field. Thus practically, they serve as an advanced medical dictionary or thesaurus for researchers & students.

So, before you begin your search, it is always recommended to think about your research question in terms of the PICO Format, which is Population (P), Intervention (I), Comparison/Control (C ), Outcome Measure(O).

Let us look at one example:

Our Research Question/Problem is, we want to know if intermittent fasting helps in weight loss among people with obesity.

Step 1: So we have our research question addressing the PICO as follows:

Population- People with obesity

Intervention- Intermittent fasting

Outcome- Weight Loss

Now with this preliminary idea, we initiate a search in PubMed as follows ((“intermittent fasting”) AND (“weight loss”)) AND (“obesity”) without selecting any filters like a year or article types, etc. We obtain a total of 83 articles for the same.

Step 2: We now individually choose the MeSH Terms dropdown query box for each of our PICO terms in the PubMed Advanced Search Builder.

So (obesity[MeSH Terms]) alone gives us 217,927 results,

intermittent fasting[MeSH Terms] alone gives us 35,483 results and

weight loss[MeSH Terms] alone gives us 42,678 results.

Then, we run a combined search of the above MeSH terms as follows: (((obesity[MeSH Terms]) AND (obesity[MeSH Terms])) AND (intermittent fasting[MeSH Terms])) AND (weight loss[MeSH Terms]) and we obtain 325 results.

So what do we understand through Steps 1 and 2? By missing out on the MeSH terms, we would lose out on 242 articles (i.e., 325–83) to refer to.

This can be detrimental as we may end up doing research already conducted, or we may fail to know the key findings obtained in previously published work. Hence, MeSH terms are never to be ignored in research.

Key takeaways:

1. MeSH terms may be stated differently across various databases. Hence a thorough literature search must be conducted in a minimum of 3 to 5 databases to ensure our search is adequate.
2. Also, the Keywords used in previously published articles may serve as an effective, comprehensive tool for doing a good search.
3. Filters, truncations are additional tools that may refine your search.
4. Yale MeSH Analyzer is a specialized and freely available tool that provides a word grid for researchers. You can access it at https://mesh.med.yale.edu/. All you need to do is choose relevant articles based on your topic and copy their PMID numbers into the system. The software automatically creates a word grid that you can further refer to enhance your search.

I hope you find this blog useful.

Lastly, Keep the search ON!

Disclaimer: The article numbers reported in this blog are true and reported only after searching for PubMed. The numbers may defer if you access them a few days or weeks later, based on the availability of newer articles on the database.