Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) Changes and PubMed Searching: Free On-Demand Course

Posted by liaison on April 17th, 2024 Posted in: #CC/Academic List, #Health Interest List, #Health Sciences List, Webinars and Training

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The new year is in full swing, and you notice your saved PubMed searches are retrieving a lot more results now. Or you’re assisting a patron with locating literature about a concept that is new to Medical Subject Headings (MeSH), but they want older results. Or you’re updating the search strategy for a systematic review and want to know why your terms are mapping differently now. This free on-demand course, offered through the Network of the National Library of Medicine (NNLM) Moodle platform, helps you understand what happens each year when the MeSH are updated and provides guidance for these scenarios, using exercises to practice what you learn.

Successful participants will be able to:

1. Describe how the MeSH vocabulary is maintained.
2. Explain how the addition, revision, and rearrangement of MeSH terms affect your PubMed searches.
3. Check your saved searches and alerts for needed changes.

Please note that this is not an introductory course. It is intended for expert searchers. This course assumes you understand that restricting a PubMed search to MeSH terms eliminates non-indexed records from your PubMed results, and that a comprehensive search of PubMed must account for both indexed and non-indexed records. If you are unfamiliar with these concepts and are looking for an introduction to PubMed, please complete the “How PubMed Works” class (either live or on-demand) prior to taking this course.

This course offers 1.5 continuing education (CE) credits from the Medical Library Association. Register now!