Blood Pressure Determination

Working with CINAHL this time:

Search: blood pressure monitoring
No relevant results

Search: blood pressure

Result: Blood Pressure

Tried PubMed MeSH database:

Search: blood pressure monitoring

Result: Blood Pressure Monitoring, Ambulatory

Broader term: Blood Pressure Determination

Back to CINAHL:

Search: blood pressure determination

Result: Blood Pressure Determination

Looked at tree - lists narrower term: Blood Pressure Monitoring, Ambulatory

Why the narrower term did not show up in the first search, I do not know. I tried it twice. Was using the "Relevancy Ranked" search in CINAHL.

The "Term begins with" search in CINAHL did bring up the correct heading. It also brought up Blood Pressure Devices.

Blood Specimen Collection

Try searching for blood sample in the thesaurus of your favourite database. What comes up?

EBSCO Medline: stuff about blood e.g. Fetal Blood, Blood Cell Count, etc...)
CINAHL: nothing relevant - mostly stats stuff e.g. Convenience Sample
However, if you do a search for Blood Specimen Collection, it is a CINAHL Heading

Ovid Medline: Blood Specimen Collection
EMBASE: blood sampling
PubMed: Blood Specimen Collection is the second result

Now try searching for blood scalp sampling:

EBSCO Medline: same results as when searching for blood sample
PubMed: no items found

CINAHL: Fetal Monitoring
Ovid Medline: Fetal Monitoring, Scalp, Fetal Distress
EMBASE: fetus blood sampling, fetus monitoring, scalp, fetus distress, fetus hypoxia

The following MeSH and Cinahl Headings exist but were not found by this search:

MeSH: Fetal Hypoxia
CINAHL: Fetal Distress, Fetal Anoxia, Scalp

Using broader term may result in loss of narrower terms

The other day I came across the MeSH term: Trauma, Nervous System. Looking at the MeSH tree, I saw that this term fell under two broader terms:

• Nervous System Diseases
• Wounds and Injuries

However, when I looked at the narrower terms, I discovered that in the tree where Trauma, Nervous System fell under Nervous System Diseases, it had a narrower term, Spinal Cord Injuries, which was not listed in the tree where Trauma, Nervous System fell under Wounds and Injuries.

Here's a picture that hopefully will explain it better:

Note that Spinal Cord Injuries is listed on the left but not the right.

I wondered, if I searched Wounds and Injuries (autoexploded in PubMed), would it search Spinal Cord Injuries, or not?

I tried a search for "Spinal Cord Injuries"[Mesh] NOT "Wounds and Injuries"[Mesh], and there were 73 results. These results had one MeSH term in common: "Autonomic Dysreflexia"[Mesh]

Checking the MeSH tree for Spinal Cord Injuries shows that Autonomic Dysreflexia is a narrower term of Spinal Cord Injuries only when Spinal Cord Injuries is a narrower term of Nervous System Diseases, not Wounds and Injuries.

This means that if a searcher decides to use a MeSH's broader term to search, they risk losing some of the narrower terms of the original MeSH. I didn't know this before, but will be sure to check the tree for this phenomenon in future searches.

BTW, if you're thinking of trying it yourself, you'll notice that Spinal Cord Injuries is also listed immediately under Wounds and Injuries in the tree, which fooled me for a little while. However, this does not change the phenomenon explained above.

Neuromuscular blockade

If you are searching for drugs causing neuromuscular blockade, there are two MeSH to try:

Neuromuscular Blockade
Neuromuscular Blocking Agents

And if you are searching in PubMed, the second one is searchable as a Pharm. Action:

"Neuromuscular Blocking Agents"[Pharmacological Action] OR "Neuromuscular Blockade"[Mesh]

EMBASE non-English articles

Just realised that EMBASE doesn't mark its non-English articles with square brackets around the title.

It's easy to use the English limit to remove these articles, but you have to know that you need to do that even if you've looked over the articles by hand.

Clostridium difficile

Here's a trick if you are looking for C. difficile-related articles:

Ovid Medline:search: clostridium difficile
MeSH suggestions include:
exp Clostridium difficile/
exp Clostridium Infections/

Ovid EMBASE:
search: clostridium difficile
heading suggestion:
exp Clostridium difficile/

search: clostridium infections
heading suggestion:
exp Clostridium Infections/

So the heading: Clostridium Infections does exist but you'll only find it if you know where to look for it.

BTW, CINAHL(EBSCO version) returns the same headings as Ovid Medline.

Public Health

Using Ovid's Advanced Search, with the map to mesh option,

Search: public health

Result: Public Health

However, if you check the scope note for Public Health, it makes reference to Public Health Administration.

And, I remembered that there is also a subject heading: Public Health Nursing

The map to mesh option returned all of these, plus one more, with the search: public health*

The other result that it returned was: Public Health Practice

CINAHL headings:
-Public Health
-Public Health Administration
-Public Health Nutrition
-Community Health Nursing

EMBASE headings:
-Public Health
-Public Health Service
-Community Health Nursing

Update 2016: now there are more!

Full list for PubMed:
"Public Health"[Mesh] OR "Public Health Administration"[Mesh] OR "Public Health Nursing"[Mesh] OR "Public Health Practice"[Mesh] OR "Public Health Informatics"[Mesh] OR "Public Health Surveillance"[Mesh]

Central Venous Catheters

Here's an interesting one from CINAHL:

• Central Venous Catheters
• Catheterization, Central Venous
• Catheter Care

Depending on the topic of your search, all three may be relevant, especially as there is some variation in the way they are applied.

Rural and Urban

I was doing a search for Rural Emergency Departments the other day, and came across a quirk in Ovid Medline:

If you type in:rural, it maps to the following MeSH:

• Rural Health
• Rural Population

However, if you type rural into PubMed's MeSH database or EBSCO's MeSH thesaurus (relevancy ranked), you get:

• Rural Health
• Rural Population
• Rural Health Services
• Hospitals, Rural

None of these are broader/narrower terms of each other.

BTW, if you use EBSCO's MeSH thesaurus with Term Contains instead of Relevancy Ranked, you will get only 2 MeSH:

• Rural Health Services
• Rural Population

Depending on the question, you may or may not want to use all of these, but it's good to know they exist!

Similar quirks appear in Ovid Medline when searching urban

Introduction

For several years now, I've been thinking that whenever I finish a search in Medline, it just gets filed away and no one ever looks at it again. This isn't always true, and the search strategy is recorded, but how often do I go back and look at it again?

This year I started collecting search examples for instructional purposes, but I kept thinking about recording the MeSH quirks that I came across, not only for my own use in future, but also to share with colleagues.

It's about time that I stopped thinking about it and started doing something about it.